Print on demand is super popular these days for artists to promote their work. Unfortunately, I’m here to tell you, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Very little has come of it – my shops are on Redbubble, a spoonflower, and a Zazzle.
Redbubble – Print on Demand
My Redbubble shop has a lot of patterns and art that I don’t have for sale anywhere else. You know who bought something from me? My Mom…. I’ve made a grand total of $2.25 in the three or so years I’ve had a store. I do NOT do any promotion except a link here and a few mentions on FB around the holidays.
Zazzle – more printing
Zazzle is slightly more humorous – I do not even know how long my shop has been there but I’ve only ever made $.25. I sold a card with one of my early designs and nothing else. When I initially posted there, I shared the links a lot but in the intervening years, it has been less of a priority. It seems that success on Zazzle is really about regular posting and prolific posting – there are people who make money but I don’t want Zazzle to be my job.
Spoonflower fabrics
I have a twitter feed I use to curate fabric from the site and posted for a couple of years… I love the fabrics and ease of use of Spoonflower but it is hard to get noticed & hard to make sales. I’ve had fabric for sale on the site since at least 2013 (that’s as far back as records go) and only made $128. I’ve done better since they started distributing to Amazon & Ebay, I get a lot of sales from those sites. BUT I have no visibility into why one of my designs is sold there and not others. Spoonflower gets the most promotion but it still only works out to a few dollars a year. I have paid for a test swatch of every design that is for sale, so I sort of feel like all the money I’ve made went right back to them.
Other means of making passive money…
I have ads on this site and hate to say, they aren’t profitable either. I’ve made $2.20 in 3 years on this site. Low traffic and low CPM tend to mean no money made from your traffic! I use the Brave browser on all my devices and am part of their Creators program. In a little over a year, I’ve kept about $5 in BAT (their token). I’ve also paid out to creators much more than I’ve kept. I highly recommend taking a look for some tiny increments of crypto just for browsing the web.
What do you think? Are POD sites successful for you?