It might surprise you that Inman actually makes a lot of his money from SEO. From what I've heard from people close to him, The Oatmeal business is still a relatively small portion of his income, as compared to the intelligence he has to use his viral marketing ability to promote websites that actually create large revenue streams through organic traffic.
I'm sure Oatmeal is his "pet project", the one he loves doing - but the SEO part is the one that pays the bills. It seems, of course, that he could monetize Oatmeal a little better without coming off as a blowhard, but I'm not close enough to the situation to say.
Howdy, I'm the Economist writer behind the Pease Porridge Hot story. I spoke to Matthew at some length, and have followed webcomics for over a decade. I'm not sure which people you spoke with, but Matthew clearly spends the majority of his time drawing The Oatmeal, dealing with sourcing merchandise, managing his web site (including programming).
There's no SEO business that he says he's currently involved with, and I have no reason to doubt that based on his posting schedule and the scope of The Oatmeal's operations.
We talked quite a bit about how traffic is generated, but there wasn't room in the article to discuss. Case in point was a cat comic he had posted the day we spoke that had received 40,000 page views an hour just before we met. He'd posted the comic, and it was already zooming around via his Twitter and Facebook feeds, and someone I believe had already linked it on either Reddit or Digg.
I'm sure Oatmeal is his "pet project", the one he loves doing - but the SEO part is the one that pays the bills. It seems, of course, that he could monetize Oatmeal a little better without coming off as a blowhard, but I'm not close enough to the situation to say.