You can absolutely make money mining alt coins. Instead of throwing lots of money at cloud mining, your best bet is to build a GPU miner for $1000-$2000 (or less). You can mine alt coins and then trade them up for BTC or fiat...or just sit on them and wait for them to increase in price. You can even sell off your hardware down the line and recoup some money. Something you also cant do with cloud mining.

Still tons of money to be made in this industry.