Friday's Mixed Bag Of News

Submitted by Erik Melander on March 23, 2007 - 09:13

Business

Ka-Blam, the print-on-demand printer specializing in comics, moves into new office space seven times their old, replaces their old press with three new ones, and hires more staff. The POD business seems to be going well.
I had no idea there existed an unofficial Project Wonderful blog and forum. Here's one post discussing the costs of ads.

Project Wonderful's prices are low, but I don't think most users realize just how low they actually are. I did some comparisons between ads on PW sites and other similar ads sold through conventional channels, and the results are pretty clear: the same ad space sold through PW will command a much lower price.

News

Time magazine covers webcomics. Penny Arcade, PvP, Achewood, and Diesel Sweeties gets ink (errr... pixels?).
And speaking of Diesel Sweeties, here's an article on it in The Daily News.

Misc.

The 2006 Comic Book Challenge, which blasted Platinum Studios into the consciousness of webcomic creators last year will be back this year according to the website.
The Pulse has a short report from the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing that was held on March 17.

Next Steps for PW?

by Xaviar Xerexes - 03/23/2007 - 10:49

Really - good stuff at the Unofficial PW Blog. One thread there on ideas for future developments is thought-provoking. I think the system of PW is pretty good but that for it to grow it needs a couple of things to happen:

Bigger and traditional buyers of ads in the system. To the extent PW needs to make changes to its system to be friendlier to bigger ad buyers it probably needs to make those changes. My guess is that those changes would include things like system wide ad bids (or something like Blog Ads "hives" which are publisher-created ad networks for which advertisers can buy into). But I'm not a big ad buyer - the best thing Ryan North could do in this area is find ways to talk to big ad buyers and get their feedback on what changes they'd like to see (really: need) to PW to get them more interested in using it.
Branch out into other areas: look at the current PW "cloud tag" and it's clear PW is still basically in the webcomic district on the intertubes. No reason at all that PW can't be used elsewhere immediately. Blogs, Music - lots of areas could use it easily. How to market/introduce PW to new populations is probably the key. It's not like PW is going to run a major marketing campaign on its behalf so it's growth is going to be based on word-of-mouth and cheap guerilla marketing tactics.

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Xaviar Xerexes

On second thought, let's not go to Comixpedia. It is a silly place.

I run this place! Tip the piano player on the way out.

Unofficial Project Wonderful Blog

by Xaviar Xerexes - 03/23/2007 - 10:38

I was checking this site out and I saw that they were trying to do an interview with PW Owner Ryan North - they were collecting questions here but I didn't see the actual final interview anywhere on the site.

PW is a great concept and its interesting to read people dig into it and poke at its underside. I'd definitely check this blog out if you're using PW.

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Xaviar Xerexes

On second thought, let's not go to Comixpedia. It is a silly place.

I run this place! Tip the piano player on the way out.

Good TIme Mag Story

by Xaviar Xerexes - 03/23/2007 - 09:24

That Time story is about as good a "hey kids, comics on the web!" story I've seen. From picking PA, PvP, Achewood and DS as the subjects to putting self-publishing on the web in the proper context of the decline in the newspaper comic biz/format, the writer really "got" it.

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Xaviar Xerexes

On second thought, let's not go to Comixpedia. It is a silly place.

I run this place! Tip the piano player on the way out.