Slashdot Mirror
Warren Ellis Curates new Webcomic Site
Warren Ellis has announced on his blog that he has finally been talked into curating a mass webcomics site titled "Rocket Pirates." The submission process is completely open via Warren's gmail account and invites anything as long as it isn't too terribly formal. While Rocket Pirates doesn't pay authors for submissions the site is apparently going to allow each author to post their own advertising via "Google Ads, Amazon Associates ads, ads for their own products, rate cards for prostitution services or any other damn thing on their comic's Rocket Pirates page."
...what?
No, seriously, what's the point of doing this? The comics will be hosted on this site; check. But the arrangement is non-exclusive, which means the creators are still free to host them on their own sites, also -- which presumably they would have done anyway.
Wouldn't it be much easier to create a kind of "Drudge Report" of Web comics, that aggregates links to new episodes as they appear? Seems like just about anybody could do that with some blogging software.
Breakfast served all day!
Bandwidth isn't cheap if you become popular.
Providing a site that is supported via Google ads and such would save those artists from having to come up with the bandwidth cash themselves.
With your own ads for stuff, and presumably his sponsors' ads, won't that make the website very ad-ridden? Still an interesting business model, though...
Ya, but at the same time, it really wouldn't have hurt the submitter to simple state: "Warren Ellis, influential British comic book author, has announced...". Yes, I'm lazy, and I want the work to be done for me damnit! But still, it's just good article writing.