I personally would spend cold hard cash, American Dollars, for a nice Straight Dope T Shirt. With the mast head and ‘it’s taking longer than we thought’ on the front, and ‘Cite’ on the back. Decent quality, available in both men’s and women’s sizes, maybe a choice of 3 colours. (Please, none of that illustrator’s drawings.)
Earns you hard cash, spread’s the word in a very underground kind of way, and, maybe gets people talking. Maybe you’d even see one on a celeb or in a current popular sit com. All this seems so obvious and so easy it strikes me as low hanging fruit, easy pickings.
Whenever this comes up, and it has many times, there are dozens of ‘Yeah, I’d buy a few of those!’ posts.
So please share with us what the resistance to this revenue stream is, cause we don’t see a downside. Every time you mention finding new sources of revenue someone mentions it and it seems to be then roundly ignored.
I truly believe your membership would love this. I mean, it’s so easy rock bands and bars exploit it, why not the Straight Dope?
I’m not aware of any rock bands or bars that let their patrons dictate what their T-shirts will look like. I like Slug’s illustrations; can I insist there be two T-shirts, so everybody is happy?
For One thing we are talking about a SD shirt. Not a SDMB shirt. So anything like “cite?” or [shudder] “Hi Opal!” wouldn’t work. From the stats that Ed quoted there are more unique hits brought in by the SD than the SDMB. That is the market you want to tap. Maybe if there were 3-4 designs one could be a SDMB shirt.
I would also say that I would buy a non-Slug shirt.
Second question, since no one has answered the question, and I didn’t see anyone ask anywhere up thread, how come the title of my thread now says (T-shirt design)?
I don’t object or anything, and I see now I should have included it in the title.
It just strikes me as odd that the title was changed but no answer was offered.
I changed it to make the title more specific, but I really can’t say yay or nay to your idea because I don’t make merchandising decisions for the Straight Dope. The only person who can supply an official answer is Ed, so your title had that right.
I can’t speak for the PTB, of course, but generally the answer to “Why don’t they…?” is “money”. My guess is there weren’t enough people buying the existing shirts to justify new ones.
That seems stupid, when dozens of us have made it clear that we’re not buying the existing ones because they’re godawful ugly, but that we would buy a Slug-free design.