21 Years of Wealthy Affiliate. And the Best Part Hasn't Happened Yet!

Twenty-one years ago today, Carson and I hit publish on the very first version of Wealthy Affiliate.

It was a Saturday. I know that because I looked it up this morning, which should tell you exactly how much thought I gave to anniversaries back in 2005. We weren't thinking about 21 years. We were thinking about next month. Would anyone show up? Would anyone stick around? Would the thing we'd been building at all hours of the night actually help a single person?

Somebody did show up. Then a few more. Then you.

What the World Looked Like on September 10, 2005.

I want to give you a little context for what the world looked like that day, because it matters for where this post is going. In September 2005, roughly one billion people were online. YouTube was a few months old and most people had never heard of it. Facebook was still only for students. The iPhone didn't exist and wouldn't for almost two more years. If you wanted to make money online, you built a website, you learned how to get people to it, and you helped them find what they were looking for.

Twenty-one years later, that last sentence is still the entire business.

Everything around it changed.

The tools, the platforms, the algorithms, the devices, the rules. Some of you were here when a single Google update wiped out rankings overnight and half the industry declared the whole thing dead. Some of you were here when the phone became the computer. A lot of you were here in 2020, when the world got very small and very uncertain and this community was, for a lot of people, the one place that still felt steady.

What never changed was the people. And that is the part I want you to hold onto.

The Number That Never Goes Down...

Here's a number I think about constantly. There are now more than 6 BILLION people online. Close to three quarters of everyone person on the planet. Six billion people who wake up, pick up a device, and go looking for something. An answer. A product. A little reassurance. Someone who has been where they are.

That number is not going down. It WON'T, not in your lifetime and not in mine.

What will change is what those people buy, how they buy it, and where they spend their time. Sometimes that shifts a lot, like search to social to short video to asking an AI. Sometimes it's so slight you don't notice until you look back a year later.

But the people are always there.

And wherever there are people, there is someone with a problem and someone who can help solve it. That has been the foundation of every successful business built inside Wealthy Affiliate for 21 years, and it will be the foundation of every one built in the next 21.

A Platform Is Code. A Community Is People.

I want to talk about YOU for a minute.

I think about the person who wrote their first blog post at 11pm after the kids were finally asleep, convinced nobody would ever read it.

I think about the person who got laid off, came here angry and scared, and built the thing that eventually replaced the job.

I think about the retiree who joined because they had one more thing to prove.

I think about the members who spend more time answering other people's questions than working on their own sites, and would do it again tomorrow.

Some of you have kids who weren't born when you joined and are now old enough to build a business of their own.

I also think about the people who aren't here to read this. Twenty-one years is long enough that we've lost some of the people who helped build this place. Their training is still here. Their comments are still here. Somewhere tonight, someone brand new is going to find a piece of advice from a member who is gone, and it's going to be exactly what they needed. I don't know a better definition of legacy than that.

And I think about Carson.

There aren't many two-person partnerships that last 21 years in any industry, let alone this one. Ours has, and I think it comes down to one thing. We have never once disagreed about who comes first. It's YOU (the community). It has always been you. Every decision we've made, including some expensive ones and some unpopular ones, came from that.
Yeah, we have mouths to feed too. But our goal is to scale an idea, a platform, and path.
It's been a journey and a fun one to this point. But that is not the future. Now let me tell you why I believe the best part hasn't happened yet....and in my mind, that ALWAYS has to be the future.

The Fastest Shift I Have Ever Seen..

I have been doing this for 21 years and I have never seen anything move the way AI is moving right now. Not the rise of social media. Not mobile. Not even the pandemic, when everything moved online in a matter of weeks. To give you a sense of the pace, Facebook took about four and a half years to reach 100 million users. Instagram took about two and a half. TikTok took about nine months. ChatGPT did it in two months, and things have only sped up since.

The people building these systems are openly saying that AI capable of doing most of what a person does at a computer is not a someday thing. They are talking in years. Whether you want to call that AGI or something else, it's coming, and the people who are positioned for it are going to look back on this window the way the earliest affiliates look back on 2005.

That window is right now. Today.

What WE Are Building Next!

Here is how we're approaching it. For 21 years, Wealthy Affiliate taught you how to build a business online and gave you the tools to do it. What we've been building doesn't just teach. It builds with you. Picture a co-founder that knows your niche, your voice, your goals and everything you've ever published, sitting inside your business 24 hours a day. Picture a team that executes the work you used to do alone at midnight, while you focus on the decisions only you can make. Picture every bit of context you add compounding, so the business you're running a year from now is smarter than the one you're running today, and the one after that is smarter still.

I'm not going to spill all of it in this post. But I will tell you it is the biggest thing Carson and I have ever built, bigger than the original launch, and I have never been more excited to ship something in my life. The next 12 months are going to be the most important in the history of this platform.

The Mission Hasn't Changed One Inch...

Help real people build real businesses online. Keep the community at the center of everything. Stay ahead of whatever is coming so you never have to figure it out alone. AI is the how. You are the why.

To Carson, to Aaron, to Kyle (the other one), to Jay, to our support team and every person who has ever answered a question in this community at 2am for someone they'd never met... thank you.

Thank You, WA Family. (We Mean it)

Twenty-one years ago, two guys hit publish and hoped somebody would show up.

You showed up. You stayed. You built things. You helped each other. You made this the place it is. I don't have a better way to say thank you than to keep building the best possible version of Wealthy Affiliate for you, and I promise you, that is exactly what we're doing.

Happy 21st, WA family. Here's to the next 21. And yes, 21 means WA is finally old enough to have a beer with us in the US. Beer with Kyle Fridays was just ahead of its time.

So tell me... what year did you join, and what is the one thing Wealthy Affiliate changed for you? I'll be in the comments reading every single one.