How the Mint Makes Money

Since its launch in 1998, The U.S. Mint’s website has been writing its own success story. Monthly traffic has grown from 176,467 visitors in January 1999 to more than 930,000 in January 2000, and it now eclipses more than 1 million visitors per month. In addition to providing the general public with a wealth of information on the Mint, its history and the process of coining, it was also making money?electronically, that is. The site generated $156 million in 2000 through its online catalog, which had launched in April 1999. There, shoppers can buy coins, money clips and even bolo ties. (The Mint’s total annual revenues are more than $1 billion.) By September, the site also signed 460,000 subscribers to its product newsletters. But money wasn’t the only thing that the Mint was after. Harris wanted the site to provide important lessons in American history to school-age children, and she had been given a $50,000 grant from the Department of Education to do just that.

The education project, HPC (an abbreviation for History In Your Pocket [HIP] Pocket Change), was redesigned last year with faster downloads and more animation.

New versions of the site’s most popular games?Puzzle Mint (a collection of online jigsaw puzzles of the new state quarters), Mark My Words (an interactive and downloadable word search with a coin theme) and Cents of Color (where users can design their own color schemes for the state quarters)?are making the site more popular than ever. They also turned the Mint into a Web Business 50 winner. While users are playing Mark My Words and putting together puzzles at Puzzle Mint, they are exposed to factoids?for example, the Constitution was approved by the Second Continental Congress Sept. 17, 1787?about the Mint, U.S. history and coins.

"Because the success of the online gaming community is so well-known, the Mint sought to use it as a vehicle for its educational information," says Harris.

HPC has seen traffic jump 325 percent from July 1999 (17,989 users) to July 2001 (58,505 visitors). More important, she says, the share of HPC traffic as it relates to the rest of the site has grown from 2.9 percent to 6.9 percent over the same period.

"It’s what users want," says Harris. "They want to be entertained. We use games to lure and engage users, but we also use them to educate. With most of our games, we have decided that those who play them will not leave without learning something about coins, history or geography."