By accident or design, selling T-shirts is big business on Web

By accident or design, selling T-shirts is big business on Web:

"CollegeHumor.com, a site offering jokes and pictures from college campuses nationwide, sells T-shirts that say 'My other shirt has its collar up,' 'What Would Ashton Do,' and dozens of others. Its parent company, Connected Ventures LLC, says it takes in roughly $200,000 in monthly revenue from the shirts, about half of its total income. 'A year from now things could be very different, but for now, T-shirts are a great way to monetize the Internet,' says Josh Abramson, one of the site's founders.

It turns out the T-shirt is a perfect fit for online commerce. It captures the Web's renegade allure and allows surfers to show off their virtual journeys. Easy to make and deliver, T-shirts often cost $15 or less online.

More than 1,500 Web sites now sell T-shirts, says Rodney Blackwell, a Sacramento, Calif., entrepreneur who runs several Web sites. Mr. Blackwell, who began cataloguing the number of sites offering T-shirts in early 2004 for one of his Web properties, tracked just 500 such sites last year before the market exploded."