The Oatmeal (online cartoon) earns ~$1000/day | Hacker News Reader

The Oatmeal (online cartoon) earns ~$1000/day

economist.com

185 pointsarn67 comments

Sure 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.

It's not an article in The Economist; it's a post from one of their blogs on the site.

That’s revenue from merchandise sale. What are the margins on that?

not 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

“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.

Even Yogurt knew where the real money was: Merchandising. The Oatmeal the Flamethrower

I want a The Oatmeal the Flamethrower t-shirt.

As a broad rule, typically 20% - 30% retail markup on fashion merchandise.

For many t-shirt brands, typical cost to produce is $3-5 or so, with wholesale to stores at $9-12, retail at $18-24

Licensing 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=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.

I'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.

I 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.

This 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.

Jobs board too.

My 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.

Thats pretty entertaining. Even if it's to troll childless 30 year olds.

Who cares, as long as it's funny.

Matt also co-founded SEOMoz and Mingle2, which was acquired: http://0at.org/

He'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.

I wish he would continue his "state of the web" posts.

$1000/day is revenue, not earnings, FWIW.

It also proves that Online advertising wont get you much. Creating and selling your own stuff will bring you more bucks.

$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).

Interesting. I'd love to hear more about this. You don't happen to blog about this process do you?

No, 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). 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.

I think what he meant to ask was if you have a personal blog where you explain what you exactly do.

Yeah, I understood that. I don't blog and personally think blogging is mostly a waste of time (time spent writing = time not making money), but I basically explained the major concepts behind what I've spent the greater part of 2010 doing. Sorry if I caused any confusion.

Wow, thanks for this reply, it's exactly the kind of info I was looking for. I've checked out those forums and most seem to have a great deal of noise, however, the stickies you mentioned in BHW do have a lot of really useful information to get started.

If you can filter out the noise, you can find a few gems. I've had good luck with taking existing promotion methods (which everyone and their brother are doing) and putting a unique twist on them.

If you can think outside the box, you can do really well.

Making the first $10/day is extremely hard. Once you hit $10/day, getting to $100/day is pretty easy. Then $1000/day... :)

By promotion method, do you mean your landing page or the way you promote your landing page?

The latter. You'll generally see strategies based around a certain facet of internet advertising (buy PPC ad placement, do SEO, follow people on Twitter discussing the item/niche, etc.), but few people will combine them or leverage them in new and interesting ways.

Matt 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

Summary: Pander to your audience.

A more informative version:

http://unfunnythings.tumblr.com/post/1312737586/theoatmeal

from 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).

The 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).

This is correct. It was not The Oatmeal.

See http://www.27bslash6.com/reddit.html

This guy reminds me of Maddox (http://maddox.xmission.com/).

The guy who ticked off Reddit for being rude to a customer was this guy: 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.

Here are some threads on Reddit which called him out: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_ga...

And: 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.

He was very active on Reddit while he was first starting out with comics (he did an IAMA and commented on the site a lot, talked about SEOmoz, too), Reddit revolted on him for possibly using SEO techniques and being rude (insulting critics on twitter, etc), he started redirecting any traffic from the reddit domain to a rickroll page, and now everything seems to be back to normal.

He's been on Reddit for over 3 years: http://www.reddit.com/user/GiantBatFart

His IAMA was 11 months ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/iama/comments/aws4z

Reddit revolts (2 months ago): http://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/dreg7/how_to_pander_...

The Oatmeal redirects Reddit traffic: http://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/eb3pg/every_oatmeal_...

The Oatmeal comics work again on Reddit. Tubemonster (author of Hyperbole and a Half) defends him: http://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/eow1i/how_different_...

There you go. More than you ever wanted to know about one of Reddit's many soap operas.

I think soap operas is a more apt way of describing internet drama: hard to follow, last a long time, and when you get right down to it: the content of the drama is very thin, so why bother?

Also, nothing changes.

Redirect rickroll... that's an awesome way to make up with a website. Gotta wonder how what his traffic looked like once he did that.

He rickrolled all traffic from reddit.com.

http://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/eb3pg/

Depressing 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.

Stephen 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.

Stephen 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.

  << 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.

I suppose you're not allowed to express your opinion here without being penalized. Personally, I find this comic to be completely awful, and the drawings absolutely hideous - offensively stupid in a way that could not be exceeded even intentionally. But then, people defend Justin Bieber, too. We're not here to discuss that though.

The focus of the HN crowd is going to be on how he obtained his high level of (financial!) success. To me, it's yet another lesson that mediocrity and lack of talent are no barriers to success. Other factors such as persistence, marketing savvy, funding, connections and lack of any shame about self promotion (this guy practically spammed the hell out of Reddit and Digg 2008-2009) can take you very far.

Another lesson is to avoid saying amazingly haughty things like, "clever only to people of pedestrian intelligence."

Metacommentary is annoying, but here goes. His comment was downvoted because it was demeaning without furthering the discussion much. I considered downvoting your comment because it insultingly misstates the reason for members' downvotes when the actual reason is pretty obvious; I actually voted up your comment (since it was down to -1) in spite of that and its defeatist tone because it still made an interesting point.

I see lots of discussion prompted by stcredzero's comment (11 replies, including this one and the 2 deleted ones). How again did it not further the discussion?

Another lesson is to avoid saying amazingly haughty things like, "clever only to people of pedestrian intelligence."

The lesson I've received, after sparking all this discussion, getting voted down, then back up again, is that it pays off in the end to be open and genuine.

I have a problem with people who seem to be so passionate about stuff they hate. You use the example of Justin Bieber, who my niece quite likes, but loads of people do not. I tend to ignore the things that have no effect on me, and I do not like. Other people feel the need to attack such things. They are the ones with the problem.

If you do not like something, why bother wasting your time commenting on it. Sure, if it is something that affects you, like your government or road rules, go ahead. If it is something you can ignore, then YOU are being the fool.

I agree with your "foolish" comment :)

I'm not concerned with Justin Bieber or Oatmeal specifically. Personally I'm interested in, and disappointed by, the phenomenon of people with no musical talent being successful musicians, and humorists with no discernible wit or drawing skill being successful comic artists. The problem is not the people who are successful - the problem is with the audience. To each their own, but you don't really like something like Justin Bieber as a musical taste. People think you like it because they have too little experience with real music, and it is marketed very heavily.

While it may be "depressing", isn't it logically consistent with how the world appears to work?

One way to make a lot of money is to sell a lot of a product.

Most people are of "pedestrian" (average) intelligence; ergo, to sell a lot of product you must appeal to those of average intelligence.

As any industry grows you see this "regression towards the mean" - one only has to cock one's ear slightly to the side to hear the lamentation of readers, gamers and movie-buffs about how "everything has gone to the dogs".

Good for him. Seems like he's working hard for it :)

It 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.

Howdy, 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.

I know people who know him personally.

So he is not funny, not clever and has absolutely no artistic talent. Seems like someone the mainstream media can really get behind.

That's funny, I was just looking at their advertising stats here: https://advertisers.federatedmedia.net/explore/view/theoatme...

According to that site they get around 27m page views per month.

congrats, you magnificent bastard.

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