Gumroad Overrated – Just Me?

Question

I can't be the only one who has noticed this:According to their own website, 130.103 creators together earned over $747.716.634 on Gumroad.Sounds amazing right?Well, Gumroad has been out there for about 11 years.($747.716.634 / 130.103) / 11 = $522.47.Gumroad takes a 10% fee as well, so that's actually $470.22.The average Gumroader has made about $470.22 on average per year.I mean, not bad, but not exactly great either?You can make that much and more by selling old stuff every year on ebay/Craigslist/...Is anybody actually making significant money on Gumroad - apart from perhaps the top 0.5% of users or so who actually may be making 5 or more figures a year?

jdthedisciple · Accepted Answer

I gave this a second thought and underwent a thought experiment:
Let's consider 2 possible alternative scenarios:
I) 80% of creators are making 20% of the money, but the other 20% are rather successful, making 80% of the money. Thus, if you are at least among the top 20%, you will make, on average, per year, about
(0.8747.716.634 / 0.2130.103 / 11 * 0.9 = $1880,87
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II) 80% of creators are actually idle, making 0% of the money. All of it goes to the 20% of active creators. Thus, each of them would be making, on average, per year, about
$1880,87 / 0.8 = $2351,09
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Maybe these scenarios are closer to reality for actual creators on the platform. But even then, it's not amazing sums for a whole year. For some, it wouldn't even cover a single monthly rent. Then again, for others this might be enough to cover several of months of living costs.

leros · Answer

You're numerical analysis is not wrong, but the implication that GumRoad is overrated is incorrect. There is nothing wrong with a platform like Gumroad only having a small percentage of very successful users. Gumroad itself is no magic bullet that makes you money - that depends on you as the user to make a good product and market it properly to get sales. Gumroad is just a platform.
You mentioned eBay as an example. I bet 99% of ebay users have made less than $100 selling on eBay, but eBay is still a huge successful platform.
Same for GumRoad I'm sure.

toastal · Answer

Gumroad banned me because their CAPTCHA required too many scripts to be enabled one by one with uMatrix (which I used at the time). I ended up submitting the same post about 4 times because the error messages were incomplete and and poorly designed so I clicked submit again. When I emailed about the situation, they said they don't allow disputes and banned my email too.Moral of the story: don't skimp on error messages and make sure your CAPTCHA actually works if you really need it.