

Ask HN: What's the business model for a Tumblelog? - LeeRubenstein

Hey HN, I run EatSleepDraw.com, the largest user submitted blog on Tumblr.<p>We receive over 1,000 art submissions per week and currently have over 200,000 followers. I would love to one day turn my blog into a full time job.<p>We're hooked up with a ad network ( http://carbonads.com ) , and sell some merch in our shop ( http://shop.eatsleepdraw.com ), and we just started selling memberships ( http://eatsleepdraw.com/membership )<p>HN, What am I missing? What should I be doing differently? What's the business model for a Tumblelog?<p>- Lee
cofounder of EatSleepDraw.com &#38; Tumblr user #7 (story here: http://tmblr.co/Zi4ybyJU4uT9 )
======
thenomad
Generally, successful monetisation stories on sites like yours that I've heard
have involved creating your own product and selling it. That seems to be one
of the most effective ways to move from $1.5 CPM to $15 or $150 CPM. Affiliate
marketing works too, if there are useful products in the niche.

Obvious Question Is Obvious: do you have an email list? If not, I'd recommend
reading around email marketing, reading Patrick's latest post on Kalzumeus,
and starting one.

~~~
LeeRubenstein
We do have an email list, it has approx. 7,500 people on it. Every time we
come out with a new product we send people an email. the open rate is about
25%

~~~
thenomad
Hm - have you surveyed your list to find out what problems they're currently
facing and would like solutions for? That's the Monetisation 101 way of doing
it, so you probbly have, but...

------
10dpd
I think we'd need more info on the success of your current monetization
strategies. E.g., for advertising, what is your current CPM? How about a
rating system for views? A mobile app? Can you derive any info from the
artwork such as histograms, feature detection etc?

~~~
LeeRubenstein
EatSleepDraw receives over 500,000 page-views per month. We Net approx.
$700-900 per month from advertising, merch and memberships each month. Selling
limited edition mini pocket sketchbooks works the best (
<http://bit.ly/NGajo8> ).

I do have an idea for a mobile app, but I never heard of a tumblelog having a
mobile app. It would be super simple, just a feed of the site and you could
log in via your tumblr account submit via camera.

------
bemmu
Have you tried highlighting gift shop items in actual posts sometimes?

~~~
LeeRubenstein
yes, every time we have a new item in the shop we highlight it.

