Slashdot Mirror
Comics On The Net - A Business Primer
Snotty Pippen writes "There's a new article/report/white paper called Comics
on the Internet: A Primer in 7 Parts that's showing up in all the right
places. It's currently being cited over at
Heath Row's Media Diet and
The Comics
Journal's Journalista blog. Media Diet says thinks it's the first
report of its kind. The Comics Journal says it's how to migrate comic books from print
to web and make it work. I think it's a somewhat comprehensive overview, and the bit about print-on-demand comics is interesting."
One thing that this article didn't really go into is the already existing and very developed communities devoted to translating and distributing japanese comics on the web. Every day hundreds of pages of japanese comics, or manga are scanned, translated, and then edited (japanese taken out, english put in) and then distributed via irc, http, and bittorrent. If you're interested in dling, check out this site for a list of daily/past releases: http://www.dailymanga.fr.st/ There are hundreds of people working on this accross the world (including myself), and thousands of people already relying COMPLETELY on the web for their daily manga fix. The industry is way behind :)
The article left a lot of big-name webcomics, actually. On the other hand, all the webcomics it specifically mentioned offer "exclusive content" if you pay for their "on-line subscriptions." Neither Penny Arcade, nor Megatokyo do this. I'm not sure if the author didn't understand that these sites and ones like them (such as Sluggy Freelance) make money by using their web-presence and fanbase to generate revenue via merchandising, or if he wanted to focus on making money specifically on the comics themselves, and therefore they did not really fall into the same
category as the comics he mentioned.
It was an interesting read, but I did note that the author had a number of errors in his article. (Keenspot is not a paper publisher, though he basically said they were, for instance. It just happens that most of the webcomics on Keenspot that do get books published do so through the same publisher: Plan 9 Books).
You're right that Megatokyo doesn't do this (Piro makes his money off of merchandising, not subscriptions), but Penny Arcade offers exclusive content through the Penny Arcade Club (subscription). You get lots of stuff, like the Over Easy comic, desktop wallpapers, original art, etc. I guess Penny Arcade could even provide exclusive comic strips since they tend to have an aversion to continuity, but a story-based web comic really shouldn't offer story-related strips on a subscriber-only basis if they offer free strips as well. Either make it all subscriber-only, or don't do any of the story exclusively to subscribers.