Joey Manley interviews Columbia College business professor Todd Allen, whose 2003 study "The Economics of Webcomics" will be released in a heavily-revised second edition in a few weeks.

He talks about how he digs up the real numbers behind the "webcomic to print" hype, the inner mechanics of various advertising networks and how well they work (or don't work) for different webcomics businesses, and the recent announcements at the New York Comic-Con concerning print publishers like Marvel and DC dipping their toes into the pay-to-download digital comics market -- or, in some cases, promising to do so, without any real conviction: what are they thinking, and what are they not saying? The audio quality isn't the greatest. Sorry. If anybody wants to take the time to transcribe this, I'd be happy to post it in a follow-up.

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