Working More and Making Less

Photo of a man wearing a purple t-shirt illustrated with yellow dogs whose bodies are made out of bananas.

Last week I got an email from yet another print-on-demand platform that I’ve used to make money selling my t-shirt designs that they are cutting royalties for creators. The following day I received my monthly payment from a different print-on-demand platform, the one that’s my main source of income and it’s less than half what it was two years ago. I find myself in the same position that a lot of creatives find themselves in these days, that of working just as hard, if not harder than ever, but earning less, all while the price of [looks around] EVERYTHING has gone up.

It’s tempting to blame corporate greed for this drop in earnings, and I can’t say that doesn’t factor into this, but it’s more complicated than that. I know everyone’s sick to death of hearing about AI, and about people blaming everything on AI, but that also does factor into things. Though not entirely in the ways you might think.

One thing that is interesting about a lot of these royalty cuts, is that those most affected are the folks relying on organic traffic to sell their products, meaning they aren’t really doing much to market or advertise their products, but are relying on the internet and established online stores to get their products sold. Once upon a time this was a solid way to make a living. From one print-on-demand outfit with a little over a 100 okayish t-shirt designs I used to make an easy $15,000 a year without having to do a single bit of promotion. I’ve said it before, but the thing with golden ages is you never know you’re living through one until you aren’t.

So why has the golden age for t-shirt designers (and other print-on-demand products) come to an end? Well, firstly there’s competition. From the start you’ve never needed to be a good artist to have a profitable print-on-demand t-shirt business. Simple stick figure graphics can and do well with the right designs, and designers have always had the option to buy clip art with a commercial license and slap it on a t-shirt with a clever slogan. I know this, because it’s how I got my start. You don’t have to be clever, because you can just copy the non-trademarked slogans on other t-shirts. The print-on-demand world, especially t-shirts has been full of copycats for awhile. Now, though the rise of generative AI has lowered the barriers of entry even further. Free t-shirt designs (many of which are likely copying the work of other artists) and AI-generated titles and descriptions means that the market is currently getting flooded with products. It doesn’t mean that these t-shirts are going to outsell other human-created designs, but they are certainly making it more difficult to find human-generated designs.

In fact getting harder to find things is really going to be the generative AI legacy. Have you tried searching for anything on the internet lately? Good luck finding something that isn’t a useless AI-generated junk website. I dumped Google as a default search engine more than a year ago, but it doesn’t matter. So far, no search engine has figured out a way to reliably filter out the slop. AI pollution is rapidly making the internet useless. This, I think, is the bigger issue for the print-on-demand companies.

While bot traffic for these sites is higher than ever, actual human shopping traffic is way down. Relying on search engines to drive traffic is no longer a good way to acquire new customers. People can’t find basic information anymore, but they also can’t find things like, say, a t-shirt that doesn’t look like it was barfed out by a brain-damaged robot.

So, etailers are having to find other ways to bring in traffic. Their own advertising is one method, another for print-on-demand sites is to tap into the resource that is their army of creators. Thus we are seeing our royalties slashed to pay for ads and to pay for incentives to creators (ourselves included) to drive new traffic to the sites.

This, in a nutshell is what is going on right now in the little corner of the internet that pays my bills. If you’re in the same boat, I wish I had more promising information to share. I guess putting more effort into marketing is one strategy, but let me tell you marketing isn’t easy, especially in these days of rampant AI pollution. At a certain point if you are putting so much effort into sending traffic to a website you don’t own, you have to wonder if it would make more sense to simply set up your own web store and use one of the different print-on-demand drop-shippers out there. Of course, that introduces a whole new set of headaches, like customer service issues. Anyway, these are all things worth considering in this ever-changing landscape.

Right now my only advice is to keep creating, keep your head up and don’t let the robots get you down.