comics economics

[egypturnash]

Caveat: None of this is based on personal experience.

I've been doing a lot of lurking around webcomics discussion forae, trending towards the places where creators discuss the field. One thing I'm pondering is the financial aspect of it. Nick and I are doing Absinthe for its own sake, but I'd be lying if I said I don't have any hopes of making a few bucks off of Absinthe now and then, once it's on its way.

There are several income streams that can be tied into a webcomic:
* advertisements
* subscriptions
* donations
* merchandise (t-shirts, bound collections, posters, prints, mugs, figures, other tchotchkes)
* increased visibility for your other work (art, t-shirts, commissions, blah blah blah)

There are also costs:
* hosting
* advertising
* the time you don't spend on 'paying work'

The 'pro' success stories are the ones where the income outweighs that last cost enough. (There's also the successes of just carving time out to keep up with your hobby, and making and ultimately finishing a story in the first place.)

Not all comics implement all of those income streams, but I think that covers the range. Some thrive on donations. Some move mountains of merch. Some have enough ad-blockerless eyeballs to run on ads. Many more never reach a financial stability point.

I was walking home from the store pondering this a little. Along with the efforts of my various friends to do comics. And I think I see the economics of the 'webcomics collective': share hosting, free advertising on your buddies' strips mixed in with paying ads, share the cost in developing a good back-end. Spread your updates out a little and keep people coming in, because your magnum opus may only update on Fridays - but his magnum opus updates on Saturdays, and hers updates Sundays and Wednesdays, which means there's potentially something to bring the reader back that much more often - to flip through your merch and buy that clever t-shirt, to think about donating to one comic or the collective as a whole, to finally break down and read your whole archive and start reading regularly. Plus it's someone to split the cost of a table at a con with, get useful crit, and so on. And split up some of the business end of things with, so you have more time for, well, getting on with drawing your comic, which is what you want to do anyway, right?

I'm just pondering the economics on a rainy day, instead of sitting there and drawing. I'm also pondering the fact that I feel like all the comics CMSs I've seen suck, my kludge of an image gallery not excluded, and that I keep having this weird urge to learn one of the modern web-app frameworks and associated 'fun' languages by writing a new back end.

We'll see how I feel once I'm done with the first chapter of Absinthe, perhaps. Depending on what people on my friends list are doing with comics projects. I got a lot of drawing to do first, though.

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking small collective, not something on the scale of Comic Genesis. A handful of high-quality stuff. The content might be all over the map (aside from, given my circles, being Not Superheroes) but the words and pictures would be very good.

Of course, first I have to see if I'm in this for the long haul anyway. I know it'll be a lot easier to do Absithe on a steady schedule if it is my primary income...