You can still make money by taking: (a) a moderately-sized vertical (excluding hackers & developers)
(b) and doing any/all of the following:
- Web hosting
- Email newsletters
- Forums
- SEO
- Publishing tools (web & print)
- Ecommerce
Ok, now details from my own industry (professional and semi-professional photography).
Web hosting: at BIG Folio, we provide web hosting for photographers. We host the sites we build as well as WordPress blogs. We charge $20/month with very low space/bandwidth limits. If we tried to be a generic host, there's not way we could compete with GoDaddy at those prices. But in a vertical, people don't mind. Even though we use expensive, managed servers from Rackspace, our margins are really good.
Email newsletters: Take a look at Photojojo's ad rates: http://photojojo.com/advertising/. $6K for a 1-week sponsorship.
Forums: We advertise on one paid forum that is focused on only wedding and portrait photography (a vertical of a vertical). They have roughly 5,000 members that pay $100/year + they get good advertising rates and run an annual convention. You can do the math on that.
SEO: If you know SEO and/or social media, my guess is you could easily make $50K or more by publishing an ebook on "SEO & Social Media for [insert vertical]". I published a DVD on SEO for photographers a few years ago. I pressed 1,000 copies at Discmakers and sold them all within 18 months ... for $79/each. http://photographyseo.com
Publishing tools: This could be anything from website tools/CMSs, WordPress themes, or even tools for printing (yes, people still print stuff). One of our competitors just sells a "WordPress theme for photographers" ... they get $200 for a theme that is no better than themes you buy for $29 on Theme Forest. I know people that sell Photoshop templates for borders, albums and greeting cards. In my recent foray into restaurant tools, I've notice that a lot of people search for restaurant menu templates (the kind you print). I could go on and on in this section, but just know that people have all sorts of web/print/mobile/social publishing needs and are willing to pay for it.
Ecommerce: Not selling things directly but helping people sell things and taking a fee. We do this at NextProof (nextproof.com). We take 7-12% of sales and it's the lowest I know of in the space. The forum I mentioned above has a classified ad section and it's one of the few places I trust to find used camera gear. People are used to giving Apple 30% and Groupon 50% of their sales. I think there's lots of room to monetize (either through fees or ads) a vertical sales platform, classified system, or "Shopify for [insert vertical]".