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The Oatmeal (online cartoon) earns ~$1000/day
- ugh 16y agoThat’s revenue from merchandise sale. What are the margins on that?
- arn 16y agonot sure. FYI, xkcd also makes (or made in 2008) it's money on merchandise. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/business/media/26link.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/business/media/26link.html “People are generally surprised that we make a living from it,” Mr. Munroe said. Without being specific, he said that the sales of xkcd merchandise support the two of them “reasonably well.” He said they sell thousands of T-shirts a month, either of panels from his strip or in their style, as well as posters.
- joshklein 16y agoAs a broad rule, typically 20% - 30% retail markup on fashion merchandise.
- jaybol 16y agoFor many t-shirt brands, typical cost to produce is $3-5 or so, with wholesale to stores at $9-12, retail at $18-24
- thirdstation 16y agoLicensing is where you make your money. Check out this NYT article from 1987 about upheaval in the comic syndication business. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0DF1738F937A25755C0A961948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0DF1738F... (sorry for the long link) Reads like many of the "publishing will die" stories circulating today. States back then that merchandising accounted for 50% of revenue.
- replicatorblog 16y agoI'm surprised more startups don't consider selling merchandise or some simple physical product. The margins can be pretty healthy and the value proposition is pretty simple. I think the recent spate of successes on KickStarter will tip people in this direction. If you can make something novel, ala AirBNB's Obama O's cereal it seems like an easier path to ramen than AdWords.
- philwelch 16y agoI think The Oatmeal started as a marketing campaign for an online dating site. Some of the older comics still have links to it. Merchandising seems questionable, though. Consider: You have a business, and you're going to sell merchandise to promote your business. Now you have two businesses.
- ekidd 16y agoThis is a perfectly valid strategy for a small business or a bootstrapped startup. For example, try to figure out how many different businesses 37signals is in. I'm aware of online software, books, training and advertising, and there's probably a couple of others. As they put it: "Sell your byproducts." This strategy probably doesn't make sense for a funded startup, however.
- spitfire 16y agoJobs board too.
- stcredzero 16y agoDepressing to me, because I find most of the content there to be, "clever only to people of pedestrian intelligence." Then again, perhaps this is just savvy marketing.
- presidentender 16y agoStephen King, whose success is similarly depressing to some, mentions this specifically in 'On Writing.' His great gift, as he put it, is to entertain those of similar intellect to himself. Fortunately for him, he's on the top half of the fat part of the bell curve, so there are many such similar intellects to entertain. I am glad to be one. While I find 'The Oatmeal' to be somewhat boring and trite, I don't begrudge those who like it their enjoyment, nor do I begrudge the author his income.
- stcredzero 16y agoStephen King, whose success is similarly depressing to some, mentions this specifically in 'On Writing.' His great gift, as he put it, is to entertain those of similar intellect to himself. I think this is an exercise in awareness, which would be of particular value to the HN crowd. Apple's products are often castigated because their construction/composition/stats go against the preferences of a part of the highly tech-savvy crowd. However, this criticism doesn't take into account the intended audience. There is something similar at work with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Certain purists might find the language impure and the Rails DSL too focused on a particular way of doing things, but there is a large audience that really likes and benefits from using that software. While I find 'The Oatmeal' to be somewhat boring and trite, I don't begrudge those who like it their enjoyment, nor do I begrudge the author his income. Well said! (Better than I did.) I don't begrudge either of those. I also hope no one in this society [1] begrudges my right to express my opinion. [1] - Deliberately ambiguous, as it's widely applicable.
- blacksmythe 16y ago<< nor do I begrudge the author his income I don't think any of us begrudge the author his income. I imagine many people are looking at that and thinking what I am which is "why couldn't I do at least as well". This is much unlike reading xkcd, where I know quite well that I couldn't do as well.
- richcollins 16y agoMatt also co-founded SEOMoz and Mingle2, which was acquired: http://0at.org/ http://0at.org/
- JusticeJones 16y agoHe's also did an interview with Mixergy in March of 09' if anyone is interested. It's a little date at this point, but his main message is still relevant. If you participate in social bookmarking websites you'll eventually know what content they want to see.
- ilovecomputers 16y agoI wish he would continue his "state of the web" posts.
- michaelbuckbee 16y agoMatt gave a very entertaining Ignite talk that goes into some of his reasoning and marketing decisions behind his work: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/ignite_video http://theoatmeal.com/blog/ignite_video
- citricsquid 16y agoSummary: Pander to your audience.
- ubernostrum 16y agoA more informative version: http://unfunnythings.tumblr.com/post/1312737586/theoatmeal http://unfunnythings.tumblr.com/post/1312737586/theoatmeal
- zackola 16y agoGood for him. Seems like he's working hard for it :)
- vaksel 16y agofrom what I understand the majority of his traffic came from gaming reddit, which recently turned on him after he did something (don't quote me, but I think it had something to do with cursing someone out who got tired of waiting for a book).
- lmkg 16y agoThe cursing out episode was from Twenty Seven B Slash Six, not The Oatmeal. And the bigger hubbub was over the fact that the author posted personal information on reddit (trying to confirm someone's shipping address).
- moxiemk1 16y agoThe guy who ticked off Reddit for being rude to a customer was this guy: http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html The Oatmeal may get most of their money via Reddit, but I don't think Reddit has a beef with them.
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoHere are some threads on Reddit which called him out: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_game_digg_using_infographics_voting/?limit=500 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_ga... And: http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/dril6/the_oatmeal_aka_giantbatfart_aka_matthew_inman_is/ http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/dril6/the_oatmeal_ak... Basically someone working SEO used GiantBatFart (The Oatmeal's Reddit username) as an example of people using SEO on Reddit and Digg. Long story short, The Oatmeal got mad.
- InfinityX0 16y agoIt might surprise you that Inman actually makes a lot of his money from SEO. From what I've heard from people close to him, The Oatmeal business is still a relatively small portion of his income, as compared to the intelligence he has to use his viral marketing ability to promote websites that actually create large revenue streams through organic traffic. I'm sure Oatmeal is his "pet project", the one he loves doing - but the SEO part is the one that pays the bills. It seems, of course, that he could monetize Oatmeal a little better without coming off as a blowhard, but I'm not close enough to the situation to say.
- GlennFleishman 16y agoHowdy, I'm the Economist writer behind the Pease Porridge Hot story. I spoke to Matthew at some length, and have followed webcomics for over a decade. I'm not sure which people you spoke with, but Matthew clearly spends the majority of his time drawing The Oatmeal, dealing with sourcing merchandise, managing his web site (including programming). There's no SEO business that he says he's currently involved with, and I have no reason to doubt that based on his posting schedule and the scope of The Oatmeal's operations. We talked quite a bit about how traffic is generated, but there wasn't room in the article to discuss. Case in point was a cat comic he had posted the day we spoke that had received 40,000 page views an hour just before we met. He'd posted the comic, and it was already zooming around via his Twitter and Facebook feeds, and someone I believe had already linked it on either Reddit or Digg.
- InfinityX0 16y agoI know people who know him personally.
- superduper 16y agoMy problem, if it really is one, with The Oatmeal, is that he isn't creating comics as an art or for entertainment. He creates comics that he knows will be linked to and drive up page views. A great example of this is his recent Christmas comic, where he portrays 30-somthings without kids having horrible holidays, which resulted in a fair amount of 30-year-olds getting mad and linking to his site when explaining why it pissed them off.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago$1000/day is revenue, not earnings, FWIW.
- shashank261 16y agoIt also proves that Online advertising wont get you much. Creating and selling your own stuff will bring you more bucks.
- getsat 16y ago$1,000 USD/day isn't even hard to attain if you have some coding/sysadmin skills and can grok basic marketing techniques. There's plenty of offers and affiliate programs that pay upwards of $20 per conversion and there's myriad white, grey and black hat ways to send traffic to them. 1,000 leads x 5% conversion rate x $20 per conversion = $1000/day. 1,000 leads a day can be obtained relatively easily. 5% conversion rate is extremely conservative (for the offers/programs I run, anyways). I stopped working at venture-backed internet startups this year because I figured out how to make far more money on the internet (mostly) passively. Now I can work on my own "startup" projects and other endeavours (e.g., learning Haskell).
- GotToStartup 16y agoInteresting. I'd love to hear more about this. You don't happen to blog about this process do you?
- getsat 16y agoNo, blogs (Wordpress) are for getting Google traffic to you so you can get clicks through to your offers. ;) Basic overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization Where I generally find products to promote (they usually come with banners, pre-made landing pages, etc.): http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm Recommended forums: http://blackhatworld.com http://www.warriorforum.com http://forums.digitalpoint.com 99.99% of the stuff people are trying to sell on those forums is crap, but there's lots of general information there that's very good. BHW's "Making Money" section has a tonne of stickied topics under each subsection with good info. The advantage of having web dev/sysadmin skills is that you can take a method people are running manually (and probably even example code that's floating around) and scale it easily to 100x what they're doing. You don't have to innovate, you just have to automate and scale. Be careful if you use shady methods. If the product owner realises what you're doing, they'll kill your account and refuse to pay the middleman who will refuse to pay you. :) If you meet/befriend other people in IM and establish that you're not a noob, doors will be opened to better offers/products and better terms for payment e.g., being paid three days after the end of the week ("net 3") instead of seven days ("net 7"). You can get $75 USD free credit when you register on Adwords (http://adwords.google.com http://adwords.google.com). After a few days, you'll be able to decrease your bids on keywords to $0.01, so $75 = 7,500 people clicking through to your landing page/offer. Unless your conversion rate is atrocious, you'll make back far more than $75. This isn't a bad place to start experimenting. SEO works, too, but it's more of a "long haul" thing. PPC advertising gets you traffic right now, but you have to be careful that it doesn't annihilate your profit margins.
- mmaunder 16y agoSure he's rubbed a few folks the wrong way but he's a satirist. That's his job. I've worked with Matthew in the past and he's a good guy who conducts himself professionally. He's also worked his ass off to get where he is and the economist article is a huge coup for his career. You turkeys should be congratulating him.
- chunkbot 16y agoIt's not an article in The Economist; it's a post from one of their blogs on the site.
- Dramatize 16y agoThat's funny, I was just looking at their advertising stats here: https://advertisers.federatedmedia.net/explore/view/theoatmeal https://advertisers.federatedmedia.net/explore/view/theoatme... According to that site they get around 27m page views per month.
- hristov 16y agoSo he is not funny, not clever and has absolutely no artistic talent. Seems like someone the mainstream media can really get behind.
- zachahack 16y agocongrats, you magnificent bastard.