Ecommerce Goes Social

by Jack Humphrey on Feb 21

Site: Threadless.com

Business model: User generated t-shirt designs. Community generated profits.

How It Works

“Without you, baby, there ain’t no us!” -Threadless.com

threadless.JPGUsers submit artwork for T-shirt designs. If they get popular, artists get what I consider the first real reward worth going for on a social revenue share site: $10,000 for the popularity of the design and $2500 more in reprints and other goodies.

The problem with revenue sharing in social media has always been that the companies have been extremely stingy and keep most of the money, preferring to dole out trinkets and pennies to the users who made their sites popular in the first place.

(HubPages is a great example. Revenue sharing Google Adsense is a ridiculous model even for the highest traffic participants, yet sites like it still act as though they are cutting edge by allowing you to have a few pennies a month from your meager Adsense revenue – even high traffic pages only make a pittance.)

Threadless.com is going the right route by making users a real part of their model and sharing a lot more of the pie. Their success is absolutely assured with this model and users are paid more what they are worth.

The time for “let them eat cake” is over with social media revenue sharing models of the past. Users are wise to the fact that they are the machine that generates the interest in these kinds of sites. And now they have an example of how they should be treated for making a site wildly popular.

Thanks to Bryan Azorsky from Bagettes.com for sharing this cool site with me today!

Tagged as: revenue sharing, social communities, social media, social t-shirts

  • http://hubpages.com Jason Menayan

    Well, we offer 60% of the revenue a user’s page generates, so I wouldn’t say that we’re the stingiest one in our space. Maybe you’re thinking of one of our competitors?

    In fact, we’re one of the most generous, and lots of our users are happy with the hundreds of dollars per month (or more) that they’re making on the site. What HubPages also offers is search engine visibility. A blogger trying to get the same traction from Google and Yahoo with articles posted on their new-to-the-world blog would be sorely disappointed, relatively speaking.

    Jason Menayan
    HubPages

  • http://www.jackhumphrey.com/cd Jack Humphrey

    Jason,

    I guess that reads a little harsh now that I look at it again. You’re right that your 60% is more generous than many rev share social sites out there.

    And there’s no denying at all the search engine visibility HubPages offers. The rev share actually means nothing to me because I am there to use good content to generate more visibility.

    That visibility going to sites of mine which have long given up on Adsense as a revenue model. Maybe you guys are thinking about other higher paying ways to bring in more income for the average user, but most people I work with are at HubPages for the visibility rather than the rev share.

    My excitement over seeing a new model of rev share got the best of me and I could have easily picked on someone else in my example who’d end up being far more deserving of the comparison than HubPages.

    You guys could end your rev share today and still have plenty of people building out the property for the sheer benefit of visibility alone. I must be responsible for sending at least 100 regular users over and I will continue to do so, but with the focus being on visibility and not making a killing on the rev share, even if it’s better than a lot of others out there.

  • http://www.raymondloesch.com Ray Loesch

    Hey Jack,
    I went over and checked this site out and had a question that I could not find the answers to over on their site. My son is an aspiring artist and is interested in having some of his drawings used on a clothing line, so this post caught my eye. By submitting your artwork for votes and consideration it seems to me that if your artwork is chosen or favorited highly they will use that artwork on their Tee Shirts, do you lose the rights to that artwork. This model would work great if you got a piece of the revenue created from the sold shirts and were able to keep your design rights. The Cafe Press model works perfectly for this, maybe they should add a more social method of communicating with the users of their site.

    Ray Loesch’s last blog post..If I Die Before I Wake

  • Eric

    Jack,

    That sure got a quick rise out of the folks at HubPages! It is nice that they share some revenue but there is need for better models. They will probably start appearing as Web2.0 expands.

  • http://hubpages.com Jason Menayan

    Hi Jack,

    I appreciate the reply. We do pride ourselves on having a generous revenue share compared to some like Squidoo (which, I believe, offers 50% of profits = after costs/expenses; we offer 60% of revenue). It does work for a lot of people who are inclined to write a lot of one-off topical articles.

    I can understand that AdSense, which is wholly contextually-driven, not working as well on a blog, where contextual nuance is a lot harder to decipher and match to ads.

    But yes, there are plenty of users who are there to promote their own sites/blogs, which is fine with us, provided they write original content on our site (and don’t just trot out copied stuff, which is just plain lazy) and they don’t get overly aggressive with linking. I agree, for them, rev share might be just the icing on the cake rather than the main draw.

    Best,
    Jason

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