Every once in awhile someone in the web comic community gets elevated to a status where off hand remarks can cause a bit of drama in the huge world that is webcomics. It appears this is something which Eric of Websnark has slowly come to realize over the past few months. He has had a little bit of a bad week (by saying a little I’m using litote to it’s fullest extent) and in the middle of it all he writes what he thinks is a puff piece and ends of starting a full drama.

He talks this over with Kurtz of PvP and ends of with a T-shirt idea that’s pure gold: Continue reading →

I hope this is not the first time someone has thought of this. The idea of creating a Firefox extension must have been done before. Besides the simplicity of the whole extension the concept can be expanded to something every web comic reader would love. Let’s take for example any site which likes to review web comics and say they create an extension which updates with new web comics every so often. This way not only can you keep track of your favorite strips from the menu bar but you could also be exposed to new ones without ever doing a search.

Now if only we could find someone to put this together…

While this post isn’t exactly about web comics specifically, listeners of our show and others like it might find it interesting. Apple has decided to fully embrace the concept of podcasting and has updated it’s popular music management app and online music store, iTunes, accordingly. If you update to the latest version of iTunes you’ll see a new playlist icon for podcasts and you can use that section of the app to subscribe to any podcast RSS/XML feed.

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The one business model that is suppose to solve the money problem for web comics is micropayments. The idea is an artist offers their work in soft form at a fraction of the cost in hard form. For instance Jon Rosenberg offers two comics for $0.25 through BitPass when the paper form costs $4. This method as applied to web comics comes from Scott McCloud. Twice now Scott has shown reasonable success using this method therefore convincing Jon of Goats to give it the once over.

The problem is it failed. We’re not talking it barely scraped enough money, we’re talking it plowed into the side of a mountain on freakishly clear day. How did that happen? To make sure we all know just how bad Jon reports that during the 8 days of BitPass Merchandising was down to 30% normal. That’s like being on the radio telling the pilot there’s a mountain 5 minutes before the crash.

So what when wrong? The common opinion I hear centers around not leaving BitPass up long enough. It’s like telling someone who has been shot that they are not going to bleed to death but let’s not block it and see what happens. To be fair that is a perfectly viable issue. Jon has been notorious for saying that BitPass would not work as a business model and that may influenced his readers into not purchasing the two comics for sale. There is also the issue that BitPass is still new and given enough time a transition will occur once every becomes comfortable. Here is where Jon tells everyone the problem materializes. Two families simply can not live off an experiment and the trend in 8 days was showing bad times ahead.

There are quite a few people out there complaining and just as many people cheering for seeing McCloud idealism evaporate. Here’s where I’m going to split hairs. Micropayments is a great idea for a business model, except the current method is flawed. There has to be some incentive for coming back to spend more money or the price of the product has to be so cheap that it really doesn’t matter. By offering whole comics at $0.25 Jon was cutting off his merchandising market. Why pay $3 when I can pay a quarter? Instead Jon should have left the paper comic alone and gone straight for the archives.

Offer today’s strip for free but force readers to pay $0.005 to read any one strip in the archive for the day. Get it? It’s a micropayment. Which reader out there wouldn’t pay 3.5 cents to catch up on the past week’s strips that you missed? Especially for such a fantastic strip like Goats. There’s no annoying monthly bill from a subscription and you could read the entire archive for around $15. For those of you who don’t believe this will work how do you think half the ads out there work? The advertiser pays you a penny for every visit your site sends them.

Micropayments are not the solution but neither is simply selling ad space. One of these days we’ll all realize that there is no one solution to making money on the internet, otherwise everyone would already be living off of it.

Every year now there’s just another report telling us that all media is down in numbers. It doesn’t matter if it’s TV, books, newspapers, music industry, or the box office but they’re is always someone complaining. There’s always someone else to blame as well. For TV it’s supposedly reality TV and the internet, newspapers blame it on specialty magazines and the internet, while the music and movie industry blame it on piracy and the internet. Anyone else notice the trend here?

For every complaint there’s the common thread of the internet destroying business as we know it. What’s so wrong about that? Is the world so scared of change that it refuses to see the obvious? The answer is yes, we’ve always been afraid to change and the coming domination of the internet is no exception. The real question is who will be the first to come up with a real business model for the internet. It may be micropayments, ad space, or simple donations but somewhere out there is at least one solution if not a thousand others.

It looks like the whole Keen organization is having trouble. Last Thursday Kelly “STrRedWolf” Price stepped down temporarily as an admin for Keenspace. On the forums you can find Kelly’s post concerning his reasoning but basically it’s a lack of communication. Kelly has been an admin of the space for over 4 years now without contract or pay for the past year. Sounds like even though the Keen group may be superheroes in the web comics arena they still suffer from the same problems as in other strip.

Let us hope the big four resolve the communication issues quickly before Kisai decides to take the her issues in the same direction.

I think I’m in agreement with xerexes on this one. I would like the idea of the web zen more if there was some kind of explanation on the site. From the title I can only assume that through a collaboration of a lot people with intelligent insight a list of topic relate sites are posted and supposedly these sites transcend that which is the web. Of course I’ve been know to blow a lot of hot air but then if you go to the site you’ll see that I can get away with saying almost anything.

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