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
Users 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!