I was 17 when I earned my first money online and about 2 years earlier I made my first website.
I never had any intention to actually make money from my smaller projects back in the days, I was hungry for information and had time to kill.
Started with a WEB C-O-M site (damn spam filter - website builder) and later started to read about HTML. Moved over to Blogger and started a shitty "news" blog for a niche I was interested in which heavily relayed on promoting big brands.
I was driving traffic to this blog trough forums I was active at and about a year later I found out what an "affiliate" was. All those brands I was already writing about and linking to had a program.
So I simply joined them, started using those new affiliate links instead of naked urls, made my first ?500 that month, didn't take long till I had made my first 1000.
This all was a long time ago, the site is still live with a lot of changes over the years and I now have multiple eggs in different baskets.