I think if I can wrangle one of our developers, we will make a highest earning artist page with more accurate data. These are approximations, actual commissions are slightly higher.
Pop Monkey $1325
jimiyo $1312
Olechka $906
Randy McQuein $850
Tuism $688
missmonster $569
Derrick Castle $528
Zack Davenport $484
Dann Matthews $456
m. Brady Clark $407
Pop Monkey $1325
jimiyo $1312
Olechka $906
Randy McQuein $850
Tuism $688
missmonster $569
Derrick Castle $528
Zack Davenport $484
Dann Matthews $456
m. Brady Clark $407
Or maybe just from that list, the artists' respective top designs?
I am putting top selling designs on the to do list.
Off the top of my head, these are the top five selling designs.
I was just curious about which the top earners were the other day.
I'm quite frankly surprised that Dr House outsold plaid vader! But all these are awesome AND proven awesome - so cool :)
I mispelled Randy's name.
Randy McQuien, Jr.
Reassuring to see that most of the top-selling tees are those with a famous person design/parody :)
Are you saying that Vader isn't as famous as Ceiling Cat and the others? ;-)
Yah, the top sellers are all pop-culture shirts...
I love making pop-culture references, but I also love making my own stuff. I just know that the more personal stuff is very less likely to sell, not because they're bad, but because they don't strike a chord with people with cultural backgrounds - which is ALL of us.
I'll bet it's the same phenomenon with all the shirt sites out there.
When TF brought in curators, it was a breath of fresh air, because at the time, the site seemed to be struggling to really get the choicest tees up for sale. Having three curators helped keep up huge diversity, with big names representing DBH, anothersite, and shirt.woot. Three sites with totally different aesthetics, and three designers/curators with the same.
But as time has gone on, there has seemed to be a bit of a drive for sales. Which, every site wants, and every site should have. But I feel like this list proves a very disturbing point: Teefury started off as an ALTERNATIVE, and now the only thing that's different is that it is more willing to go out on a copyright-infringement limb than its older daily tee counterpart is.
A quick count shows three star wars/trek designs this month. This thread shows the top 5 selling designs in Teefury history were not only all recognizable characters on tshirts, but all in a two-month span. And they don't note the Radiohead caricature, or the Lebowski shirt, or the Cobain shirt, or the Poe shirt, or lincoln/snake, or today's shirt.
We also know Randy McQuien sells well. We know the Batman stick-up shirt sold well. We know this style of shirt sells. Just like we know that, at woot, shiny anime sells, and geek pop-culture sells (sort of like a darth vader head?) And it starts giving the feeling that, if one in six shirts these last two months have been recognizable characters, and if five of them are the best selling shirts on this site, will TeeFury eventually just be a haven for a handful of OK shirts, and then scads of caricatures and more realistically drawn portraits of iconic faces? because I love good parody, I really do, but Darth Vader in Plaid is not parody. It's Darth Vader. in plaid. Meadow Blaster was parody. Nevermind the Cello, also parody. Zombama, much as I am bored out of my brain by Obama shirts, was also parody. But there's no parody to Lupus. No parody to McQuien's incessant caricatures. It's a shirt with something famous on it. It makes the real commentary pieces look like one more tired money grab, just like how well-done pieces which are also cute get unfair smurf at woot because of how pervasively poorly-done cute gets a print. It makes TeeFury feel one-note... when I get spoiler emails, I open them only to see what night I absolutely don't need to go to teefury. And lately, I want to check less and less.
Maybe I'm the only person who is noticing this and finding it to be a bad thing. After all, sales don't lie... there's simply no better representation of quality than how well you sell, right? But I have to believe that there are people out there who came to TeeFury because they were unhappy with how woot conducted their selections, or because they love the sort of artistic and creative work DBH puts out, or even hoping that one shirt a day would HAVE to lead to plenty of creativity, and are continually disappointed by work like this. It really feels as though all someone needs to do to print here is to draw someone famous well, and mock it up on a shirt. And the fact that that sells so well makes it feel as though artist appreciation is dwindling for the sake of making sure there's a big seller. And while that might be great for your big seller designers, it's smurf for everyone else. It's smurf for the designers who put in real parody and are looked at as riding the sales trend. It's smurf for the designers who have to watch work they put imagination and time into continually undersell Ceiling Cat slapped on your chest. It's smurf for designers who are put on hold, or worse, declined, because there's some potential big-seller to be released instead. And eventually it's smurf for TeeFury, because the more you foster one specific fan base over all the others, the more that fan base is appeased, and the more every other fan base gets discontent. And yeah, it'll bring you scads of money, if that's all that matters. But it'll also make you "that site to sell your paparazzi sketches". I think all four current and former curators here know full well how real designers feel about woot. If teefury follows the same "print what sells over what should print" route, it runs a strong risk of turning out no differently.
It's interesting to note that while pop culture-y joke designs represent the majority of the designs on our top sellers list, they still represent a minority of total designs that we sell.
That's not selling out - that's just selling. As the artists get a piece of that, it DOES help the artist.