Part I - What is a Weird Internet Career?

Lately, as I’ve been doing fancy things like publishing a NYT bestselling book about internet linguistics and writing a column about internet linguistics for Wired, I’ve also been hearing things from people like “how did those come about?” or “I want to be you when I grow up.” 

The bad news is, there’s no magical shortcut. The good news is also, there’s no magical shortcut. What there is, is a series of smaller and less glamorous things that I did as I was starting out, which eventually built into something larger and more glamorous. So this is a series about the early days of building all these things that came to fruition in the past year or so, in the hopes that it may be useful for other people.

I call myself an internet linguist for two reasons: one is that I analyze the language of the internet and two is that I do so in a very internettish sort of way. In other words, I have a Weird Internet Career for linguistics. You may never have encountered an internet linguist before (hello, welcome!), but you’ve definitely encountered other people with Weird Internet Careers. 

Weird Internet Careers are the kinds of jobs that are impossible to explain to your parents, people who somehow make a living from the internet, generally involving a changing mix of revenue streams. Weird Internet Career is a term I made up (it had no google results in quotes before I started using it), but once you start noticing them, you’ll see them everywhere. 

Weird Internet Careers are weird because there is no one else who does exactly what they do. They’re internet because they rely on the internet as a cornerstone, such as bloggers, webcomics, youtubers, artists, podcasters, writers, developers, subject-matter experts, and other people in very specific niches. And they’re careers because they somehow manage to support themselves, often making money from some combination of ad revenue, t-shirt sales, other merch, ongoing membership/subscription (Patreon, Substack), crowdfunding (Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Ko-Fi), sponsorship deals, conventional book deals, self-published ebooks, selling online courses, selling products or apps or services, public speaking, and consulting. 

But there isn’t necessarily much relationship between the type of weird internet thing someone makes and how they make money from it — one webcomic artist and one youtuber may both support themselves from t-shirt sales and ad revenue, while another webcomic artist and another youtuber may both support themselves from Patreon and conventional book deals. Some Weird Internet Careers have entirely transparent incomes through crowdfunding or posting their finances online; some have mysterious revenue that’s entirely surmise (or may not be enough to actually be a career). 

People who have Weird Internet Careers sometimes start out unintentionally, by making things for personal expression or because they like being helpful, but they eventually realize that they’re providing a thing that people need or want, and that there’s a version of it that someone will buy, and that they’ve build up the kind of reputation which means that people will buy from them. (You can also definitely make things that stay being just about your personal expression, as long as you’re aiming for a hobby rather than a career. Hobbies are great, you don’t have to monetize your hobbies, they’re just not what this series is about.) But I think a person could also start a Weird Internet Career more intentionally, or at least be more intentional about building an existing “making things for free on the internet” habit into a career, which is why I’m writing this series. Also, I want more people doing public-facing linguistics, at a purely personal level. 

The cornerstone of a Weird Internet Career is that you a) make a thing on the internet that people value and b) provide a way to convert that value into money. (If you have the first but not the second, it’s not a career, at least not yet. If you have the second but not the first, well, you probably don’t have much in the way of career yet either.) The thing you make might be a recipe blog, and that money might be from ads and an associated cookbook, or it might be email advice on developing a new skill and the money from an e-course on the skill, or it might be a podcast and the money from bonus episodes and merch. And so on. I know one person whose Weird Internet Career is basically “making zines about Linux (some free, some paid).” There are so many niches.

You don’t need to be famous to have a Weird Internet Career, though it often involves building a certain amount of reputation for you or your thing in some corner of the internet, but most of that reputation is built by doing the thing, not by starting off as notable from something else. Some people start off with Weird Internet Careers as a springboard into more conventional jobs, some people have conventional jobs that they find unsatisfying and develop a Weird Internet Career in their spare time (that they may eventually quit their jobs for), some people keep going with both at the same time and enjoy how they feed off each other. 

So, I said I have a Weird Internet Career as a pop linguist. How did I get it? Well, I built it. The next part is about how that happened. 

I’m posting this series about Weird Internet Careers and how to build them to my blog over the next few weeks. However, if you want to get the whole series now as a single doc, with bonus Weird Internet Career-building questions to think about, you can sign up for my newsletter on Substack here, which will also get you monthly updates about my future Weird Internet Career activities as an Internet Linguist. 

Part I - What is a Weird Internet Career?
Part II - How I Built a Weird Internet Career as an Internet Linguist
Part III - How to start a Weird Internet Career
Part IV - How to make money doing a Weird Internet Career
Part V - What can a Weird Internet Career look like?
Part VI - Is it too late for me to start my Weird Internet Career?
Part VII - How to level up your Weird Internet Career