Building a Website, The best option for passive income?

For the past 5 years I have lived off my Web sites and the advertising income from the sites continues to grow, even in financial crisis.

Stocks have recovered a little yet to me seem very risky, crisis or no crisis. Real Estate continues to drop in value yet is still way overpriced (at least here in Spain) to make any kind of passive income.

According to this article in El Economista, the Internet is the only medium that is actually grown in advertising spending over the past year – the reason most likely being that the Internet is the easiest place to track return on investment. You can actually track visits from ads and observe visitor behavior and response.

Months into the crisis I wondered if it would affect my AdSense advertising payouts. It never did, in fact they went up.

If I had 200,000 I had to invest right now I would invest it in a content rich, well paying niche Website to bring a monthly return in advertising. Part of the earnings I would spend on link builders and a portion on writers to keep the income flowing and growing without my direct intervention.