So let's look at this from an inventor's perspective: Feeling exuberant, I know Quirky will vet and accept my idea. According 109 of 823 accepted projects are

So let's look at this from an inventor's perspective: Feeling exuberant, I know Quirky will vet and accept my idea. According 109 of 823 accepted projects are on sale, so I have a 13.24% of getting my first dollar. Royalties are paid out to contributors on 10% of gross revenue. The idea originator automatically gets 40.5% of this revenue. So I would get a 4.05% royalty. Products are approximately $30, so my per unit royalty is ~$1.20 Let's say my cost for well thought invention idea is $1000 (includes time, drawing, cardboard prototypes, etc). Looking at the spreadsheet attached to the blog the average total units sold per product is 28378. However, this is a heavy tailed distribution, so we'll make two estimates (from eyeballing the spreadsheet, I divided the total units sold range into 1/3) a 33% chance they will sell 500 units a 33% chance they will sell 5000 units a 33% chance they will sell 50000 units So expected sales will be $1.20 * (1/3 * 500 + 1/3 * 5000 + 1/3 * 50000) = $22000 So my expected value on idea submission is (1 - 0.1324) * -1000 + 0.1324 * (22000 - 1000) = $1912.80 So I can expect to make about $2000 for a product idea on Quirky. Don't hold back any criticism on this analysis.