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.
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.