For the past few months, I have been following the adventures of a drop ship entrepreneur who calls himself “Patryk Marketer”. A video by Marketer first appeared on my feed in early April, with his claim that he has a foolproof system for generating passive income from AI-generated art.
In the first video I saw of Marketer, which got half a million views, he was brimming with excitement about the revenue potential of AI. All you had to do, Marketer explained, was get a site like Midjourney to dream up cool images for you. Then you upload them to Etsy and let the money flow as online art buyers discover your designs.
“I think the biggest benefit is that there’s unlimited potential,” Marketer told his viewers. “The more images you create and post on Etsy, the more money you can earn… The profit margins on these items are relatively high.” Best of all, in his view, is that the revenue stream is “completely passive.” You build something, upload it to the Etsy server, and you don’t have to do anything at all.
Marketer followed with a seminar titled “How to Sell AI Art on Etsy A to Z Blueprint 2023.” This hour-plus video has been viewed 200,000 more times, making him a modest opinion leader for people looking to make a career in the new world of post-human online art.
Essentially what Marketer was selling was clip art in bundles of 20 PNG files. The Marketer method was to use an Etsy analytics tool to find out what was selling in the digital chart space, then use Midjourney to create a slight variation to capture some of the same market.
For example, Marketer explained that he discovered a demand for mushroom clip art on Etsy. He saw that the most popular example of mushroom clipart was red, so he used Midjourney to create a batch of pink mushroom images for sale.
Marketer boasted of getting 216 orders in March by creating 23 Etsy digital art listings. That meant revenue of around $490, which translated to a profit of around $207 after Etsy fees and marketing costs were subtracted.
These are modest results, but Marketer thought things were just getting started. “I’m going to snowball,” he told his viewers. “I’m going to build it and make this thing bigger and bigger.”
Over the past six months, I’ve alternated between being morbidly fascinated and quietly horrified by the glut of garish influencers and gormless social media gurus preaching ways to “supercharge” your earnings with various “content hacks.” of AI. It really feels like watching some kind of mind virus spread. At least Marketer seemed in good spirits and relatively outspoken, so I check in with him from time to time.
His progress since those first enthusiastic declarations can be told via the evolving titles of his videos:
March 31: “How I got 200 orders in my first month on Etsy selling AI art”
May 2: “Selling AI Art on Etsy for 2 Months: Realistic Results”
May 16: “My Etsy AI shop is failing… What am I doing to fix it”
June 9: “3 months of Etsy AI art sales…what happened?”
July 7: “4 Months of Etsy AI Artwork Sales… There is HOPE”
July 11: “You won’t make money selling AI art on Etsy…Let me explain”
Paper clip tail sad.
After three months in the trenches, Marketer is ready to admit that a lucrative career as a digital artist might not be the low hanging fruit he thought it was.
“Once you get started, you realize that it’s not as simple as they say,” he recently conceded. “It’s hard to make enough money to maintain your lifestyle.”
It turns out that the type of clip art that actually sells is heavily trend-based, so you have to constantly scan the horizon and produce more stuff to master new trends. “The thing I learned – it was a hard lesson -[is that] Trends on Etsy change so fast, super fast.
Additionally, Marketer found that the profit margins aren’t that high after all, because getting the AI to generate something salable takes some effort:
When I say you won’t make money selling AI art, I mean you have to work, actively work. I thought this was going to be passive… The process of creating the AI art you’ll be selling actually takes a long time – and when I say that, some actual artists might laugh at me, and I understand why. But because there [are] There are so many AI art bundles on Etsy right now, you can’t just create clip art and list it. That means you have to spend a few minutes to maybe an hour to generate it.
It is possible – and who would have guessed? – that flooding Etsy with nearly identical AI images has diminishing returns.
Thinking about actually creating something interesting undermines the promise of this particular money-making system – the whole promise was that the AI did most of the work! “I try to spend as little time as possible fixing the images, so I can create these bundles very quickly.”
Given these realities, Marketer now recommends that instead of pursuing a freelance career selling AI art on Etsy, you get a day job and invest your earnings in running an AI business. parallel AI art. He also suggests systematizing the process into steps that eliminate thinking about artistic generation as much as possible. With such a system in place, you can then hirevirtual assistants“—Marketer says he pays two people $300 and $250 a month, respectively, to do the actual work of pumping up trendy Midjourney clip art, in an effort to bring the hustle back to some semblance of that.” passive income’ sweet spot.
So as long as you adjust your expectations from “doing what you love” to “running a sweatshop,” the dream of AI art is still alive and well.
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