Creative and traditional media is a tough sell. The primary issue is freedom of information. The gatekeepers are consolidated. Reaching any audience is a heavily taxed and, at the very least neigh impossible, feat. It does not matter what kind of business you attempt to start, search engines are not deterministic. Searching for you by name is irrelevant on nearly any and certainly all large platforms. Like I could do a ton on somewhere like eBay, but their margin is untenable. Amazon is a joke for fools. Their entire seller system only exists to mask their price fixing scam. PayPal and other payment processors online use a loophole to charge an order of magnitude more for payment processing compared to brick and mortar traditional retail. Social platforms that sell stuff take out what would be the entire profit margin of most products. Selling stuff online is a massive scam. I did it and have sold nearly $150k on eBay in 2 years of doing it professionally. It was not viable when I ran the real numbers. Total overhead was half a tick below 40%. Even at 50% ideal keystone retail (basis of traditional MSRP), 10% is not even minimum wage. The platforms will do nothing to promote you; only enough to barely string you along. It is by design. They are a means of exploiting the poor for as much as possible while masking their scams from regulations.
This is probably true in general, but as OP asked specifically about furry art, the situation is quite different. Furry art platforms like Furaffinity etc are much less profit- and algorithm-driven than platforms like Amazon and Ebay. It’s an entirely different ecosystem that exists largely outside the huge platforms.
Creative and traditional media is a tough sell. The primary issue is freedom of information. The gatekeepers are consolidated. Reaching any audience is a heavily taxed and, at the very least neigh impossible, feat. It does not matter what kind of business you attempt to start, search engines are not deterministic. Searching for you by name is irrelevant on nearly any and certainly all large platforms. Like I could do a ton on somewhere like eBay, but their margin is untenable. Amazon is a joke for fools. Their entire seller system only exists to mask their price fixing scam. PayPal and other payment processors online use a loophole to charge an order of magnitude more for payment processing compared to brick and mortar traditional retail. Social platforms that sell stuff take out what would be the entire profit margin of most products. Selling stuff online is a massive scam. I did it and have sold nearly $150k on eBay in 2 years of doing it professionally. It was not viable when I ran the real numbers. Total overhead was half a tick below 40%. Even at 50% ideal keystone retail (basis of traditional MSRP), 10% is not even minimum wage. The platforms will do nothing to promote you; only enough to barely string you along. It is by design. They are a means of exploiting the poor for as much as possible while masking their scams from regulations.
This is probably true in general, but as OP asked specifically about furry art, the situation is quite different. Furry art platforms like Furaffinity etc are much less profit- and algorithm-driven than platforms like Amazon and Ebay. It’s an entirely different ecosystem that exists largely outside the huge platforms.