Ask HN: What's the business model for a Tumblelog? | Hacker News Reader

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

Hey HN, I run EatSleepDraw.com, the largest user submitted blog on Tumblr.

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.

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 )

HN, What am I missing? What should I be doing differently? What's the business model for a Tumblelog?

- Lee cofounder of EatSleepDraw.com & Tumblr user #7 (story here: http://tmblr.co/Zi4ybyJU4uT9 )

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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.

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%

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...

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?

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.

An intriguing idea... can you extrapolate on the possible value of deriving histograms or feature data from pop art?

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

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

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