How to Monetize Your Audience (With Lessons from Wait But Why)

There was once a time when creatives and artists relied on wealthy patrons to support and promote their work.

In many ways, creatives still need supporters today. But today’s “patrons” are the people who make up the creatives’ audience – their biggest fans.

YouTubers , writers, cartoonists, musicians , artists—creatives of all kinds—are in a great position to build a business around the large and loyal audiences that consume their work. From merchandise to sponsorships to speaking engagements and book sales, there are numerous ways to monetize your creativity and audience.

This article is about finding out how Wait But Why , a globally popular blog, built a business on the basis of its content.

Wait But Why is a unique website that is largely driven by long-form content with a sarcastic but thoughtful tone. It has garnered over 371,000 subscribers and attracts millions of visits to its content each month. Tim Urban, the author and illustrator behind most of the site’s content, covers everything from visions of the future to philosophy to artificial intelligence to procrastination and whatever else interests him at the time.

Tim takes complex or abstract concepts and makes them easy to understand and entertaining—even though his word count often runs into the tens of thousands. And this in an age when some say people have shorter attention spans than goldfish .

It’s this style, depth, and commitment to excellence that has enabled Wait But Why to rank on the first page of Google for competitive search terms like “procrastination” – a true example of 10X content : high-quality content that is unmatched in terms of organic traffic, backlinks, and engagement.

But what’s most interesting is how these entrepreneurs have taken an audience-focused approach to creating a business – a business that gives Tim the freedom to do what he loves, with the support of his audience.

To understand how the company monetizes Tim’s unique mind and creative content, Andrew Finn, co-founder of Wait But Why and responsible for the business aspects of the blog, provides exciting insights in the following interview.

Want to learn more about how to build your own blog-based business? Check out this post: How to Start a Blog That You Can Turn Into a Business.

How did Wait But Why come about?

Tim and I have been business partners for about 8 years. We grew up together and have known each other since kindergarten.

We started another company called ArborBridge , how to monetize an app? 7 techniques to generate income with apps which is a test prep and tutoring company, and that’s what I still do 90% of the time.

Tim always wrote a blog on the side. He got really good, especially when he introduced stick figures. He always had this creative side that he wanted to explore. We got to the point in our other business where it didn’t need both of us anymore. So we decided to take a risk. Tim would stop working for exam prep to write full time and see what happened.

Tim has a pretty special, creative brain, so we were pretty confident that something good would come out of it full-time, even if we weren’t sure what exactly.

Because we had this other business, china phone numbers we were never forced to sell things like low-quality advertising. We were able to take the time to build the site over a couple of years. We didn’t have to worry too much about how to monetize our audience. That’s probably a luxury that a lot of content creators don’t have.

When did Wait But Why start developing its business aspects?

We had the shop from the beginning. But we worked on it little by little.

We knew we had two or three years where the site didn’t necessarily have to make money, but then there came a point where we said, “This site has to run on its own.”

We turned a bunch of posts into an eBook, started Patreon , added merchandise and other things.

But it didn’t really come together until 2016.

Wait But Why as a business is still very, very underdeveloped at this point. The goal right now isn’t to make as much money as possible. It’s about creating as many great things as possible and the business will eventually run itself.

Learn more about Patreon – the platform that makes it easier for creators to get paid

Patreon was a big breakthrough

We weren’t sure about Patreon at first. We didn’t think anyone would just give us money.

But then there were the people from Kurzgesagt – this cool video platform that is now called In a Nutshell – who recommended it.

I think part of the explanation for why it’s worked well for us is the high level of alignment with our audience. They know we’re not trying to sell them a ton of stuff. We’re not trying to put ads everywhere – we’re just trying to make really cool stuff and share it with them.

If we had advertised on our site and Patreon at the same time, people would probably have told us to go away.

What are the differences between “content marketing” and building a business on the foundation of a content site?

Where is all your attention going to go?

Content can go much further than products – if that’s the game you’re in, there are plenty of ways to make money.

I think the difference for us is that we’re building a brand around content. The business has always been content. Writing has been the best way for us to do that.

Since we are also entrepreneurs, we asked ourselves: “Is this fundamentally a good business model?”

Well, it is for two reasons:

1. It is scalable because of the written word and the Internet.
2. You can have a monopoly on it if your voice is authentic, if there is that “something” that no one else can copy.

Tim had another blog for 6 years that he wrote for every now and then. It was really funny, but only about two thousand people read it.

There’s a real difference between casual writers who are “fucking funny” and someone who thinks about their writing and what’s next every day – who makes the same funny post but puts several hours of work into it and even invests some money in promoting it.

That’s the difference between Tim as an occasional blogger and Wait But Why.