Business

The fighting card set for Penny Arcade won’t be released until next year but there’s a sneak peak on PA today.

(Note to John A: Fighting Fallon cards!) Continue Reading →

DJ Coffman, of Yirmumah! fame, has a new blog devoted to "…tips, techniques and random thoughts on making money with your webcomics…".

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“Welcome to the 21st century. The rules of the media game are changing. Those who want to survive are changing with it,” says technology consultant and author Todd Allen, who outlines the new rules of engagement in his book, Online Comics Vs. Printed Comics: A Study in E-Commerce and the Comparative Economies of Content.

In keeping with the advice in his book, the entire text of the book is available for free. Continue Reading →

Paypal has announced new pricing intended to increase the convenience of purchasing digital goods.

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The interview covers both Khoo himself and the business that is Penny Arcade.

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Joey Manley noted that comicwindows.com, a url mentioned in the NYTIMEs article on webcomics, was in fact not taken (it is still unclear what site NY TIMES writer Sarah Boxer meant to include in her article) but of course, not for long.

comicwindows.com now forwards to Blank Label comics. That has to be the best $15 or so spent on a domain name since Onlinecomics.net picked up bigpanda.net when it went defunct (Big Panda was an early webcomics portal). Continue Reading →

The Confabulators blog writes about Little Gamers posting a free download version of their first print book which collected the first 300 installments of the Little Gamers webcomic.

Click here to find a .pdf and a bit torrent file for download. Creator Christian Madsen writes:

Reason we put it online for download is because we’ve made the money to pay for the print and for the trip to Comicon, so we set it free as it should be. We believe that if you really like something, you’ll support it in some way, even if it’s avalible for free.

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Online Comics Vs. Printed Comics: A Study in E-Commerce and the Comparative Economies of Content by Todd Allen, examines revenue models for webcomics and contrasts them with the printed comics industry, concluding that webcomics may be a more viable option for emerging cartoonists. Allen talked to artists online and off including Bill Jemas (Marvel), Tony Panaccio (Crossgen), Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) Robert Khoo (Penny Arcade), Joey Manley (Modern Tales) Jon Rosenberg (Goats) and R Stevens (Diesel Sweeties) about their respective business models.

The current paper can be read in its entirety online here (a printed copy can be purchased from the same website). Allen’s paper is a follow-up to his 2003 paper, Comics on the Internet: A Business Primer.

Allen has a Master’s degree in Internet Business & Media Convergence from New York University. Allen also covered the “Technology & the Arts” beat for the Chicago Tribune’s business section, writing about topics like streaming video, online circulation audits, and the economics of webcomics. Continue Reading →

A few additional thoughts on Tom Spurgeon’s King Features story this morning at the Pulse. Despite the spin from King that they are moving to a pay-for-comics model on the web (i.e., subscription) they still seem very much torn between their current business model of newspaper distribution and fumbling towards the future. Unlike say Modern Tales, which really is a subscription site (you can only get the archived editions of MT strips by subscribing), you have to wonder how much King Features’ Daily Ink subscription site might be a bit of a shell game.

Why? Because most (possibly all) of these strips are still available for free at newspaper websites. If you have a minute, please post a comment about what’s available at your hometown newspaper’s website. I checked the Houston Chronicle for example, where much more than half of King Features’ comics appear free (although interestingly the Chronicle now restricts non-print version subscribers to only the latest installment) and the Washington Post where a number of them also appear free (the Post gives you a running archive of a couple of weeks for each comic).This all has to have impacted the amount King is charging for a Daily Ink subscription ($15/year) and certainly I’m curious as to what kind of impact it will have on subscriber numbers.

The other key question for King and other features as they navigate from wholesaler to newspapers to retailer to Internet readers is branding. No one, at this point anyhow, has much of a concept of what a King Features strip is (or any other newspaper syndicate) other than “classic” or “old” or even worse “mind-bendingly boring”. My guess is that to succeed in the new world a lot more attention will have to be paid to branding. My own sense is that King is making a mistake by lumping its entire slate of properties into one site called Daily Ink. If I was tasked with King’s Internet strategy I would have launched something like 3 sites: serials, G-rated humor and PG-13-rated humor and then for each site I would have used the established newspaper strips as anchors but I would have filled out the roster for each with web-only properties. That way King could begin to build actual brands for readers to understand and quite possibly give King a way to bust out of the G-rated box newspapers have put it in.
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