Again, the answer depends on your goals and lifestyle. The existence of an expense ratio is often a determining factor: If you are willing to trade time (in researching individual companies and rebalancing your portfolio) for money (the fees required by the fund), building your own portfolio of dividend stocks might be preferable to dividend ETFs. Then again, not every investor has the experience or knowledge to select good dividend stocks. Ultimately, it all comes down to whether you are willing and able to build your own portfolio and whether the effort involved is worth doing so. The easy alternative to becoming a dividend investor is to just buy dividend ETFs.