I've been noticing a generic trend in writing about passive income, and it shows up in multiple platforms. So, that's telling me people are just looking at stats for traffic and then trying to repeat the sane nonsense that someone else has written to build their presence. That's nothing new, we've seen copycats show up all the time on YouTube for example. The problem with the written article, however, is how much of a time suck it becomes, basically being an energy vampire giggling at people wasting minutes reading the whole damn thing only to find it provides nothing at the very end.

Here's how the article structure works.

First, it starts off with a big, eye-catching title. That's the clickbait part, no surprise, because it has to draw people into the article somehow to get them to read it. 

Second, now comes the intro transition into the personal story. It usually goes something like, I have this great channel that will make you lots of money, but first my personal story how down in the gutter I was until I found this great idea, blah blah blah.

Third, more distraction. There's a bunch of tools the reader needs to get started. At this point, some affiliate garbage might be planted, an additional way the writer can get readers to generate income for him or her by click-through, sign-ups or referral account creations.

Fourth, finally there's disclosure of the golden tool. The might even include screenshots showing how it seems to work, summary results and the most important proof of real stuff with some kind of earnings statement. There's one problem here, they don't actually give the reader the actual tool link or how to get to it. Instead, there's a whole lot of talk how it works, but there's no actual solution provided. 

Then the article ends with more links, more referrals and more follow-throughs. Check me on this; you'll find its the same pattern on every one of these articles promising great passive income. The article structure is so predictable, you don't even need to read things anymore, just scan them.

Of course, the goal in even writing these articles is just traffic. The more traffic one gets all the way through the article, i.e. read completions, the more points the author gets to presumably be paid. Medium, no surprise, tends to be the most frequent platform this pattern appears on, but it's not restricted to just that environment. Anywhere there is the means to earn income for traffic, this pattern will show up. Even here on Publish0x.