

The Oatmeal (online cartoon) earns ~$1000/day - arn
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/online_cartoons

======
mmaunder
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.

~~~
chunkbot
It's not an article in _The Economist_ ; it's a post from one of their blogs
on the site.

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

~~~
arn
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._

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

~~~
dasil003
I want a The Oatmeal the Flamethrower t-shirt.

------
superduper
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.

~~~
LargeWu
Who cares, as long as it's funny.

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

~~~
JusticeJones
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.

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

~~~
shashank261
It also proves that Online advertising wont get you much. Creating and selling
your own stuff will bring you more bucks.

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

~~~
getsat
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.

~~~
GotToStartup
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.

~~~
getsat
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... :)

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

~~~
getsat
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.

------
michaelbuckbee
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>

~~~
ubernostrum
A more informative version:

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

------
vaksel
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).

~~~
lmkg
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).

~~~
TrevorJ
This is correct. It was not The Oatmeal.

------
stcredzero
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.

~~~
presidentender
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.

~~~
stcredzero
_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.

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

------
InfinityX0
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.

~~~
GlennFleishman
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.

~~~
InfinityX0
I know people who know him personally.

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

------
Dramatize
That's funny, I was just looking at their advertising stats here:
[https://advertisers.federatedmedia.net/explore/view/theoatme...](https://advertisers.federatedmedia.net/explore/view/theoatmeal)

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

------
zachahack
congrats, you magnificent bastard.

