Thursday, March 06, 2008
Webcomics Economics
:: Posted by Bryan @ 3/06/2008 02:01:00 PM 
Von Allan is an Ottawa-based cartoonist who is serializing his graphic novel, the road to god knows..., on the Girlamatic webcomic site. In this massive blog post, Allan takes a long, hard look at all the numbers available to him, page views and hits as recorded by his own page counter, Girlamatic, and advertisers. Serious serial strips by relatively unknown talents, as opposed to humour strips or genre adventures written by Warren Ellis or a webcomics collective of perhaps lesser-known, well-established cartoonists like Transmission-X, seem like the hardest sell to a generally inattentive, nebulous webcomic audience, as Allan notes, but the actual data he presents is worth a look. I'm particularly interested in the mechanics of Project Wonderful, the hands-on indy business shared advertising model that many bloggers and webcomics participate in.
In my opinion, Allan is doing a good job promoting his work and getting the word out about his book, which I am assuming will eventually be collected in print somewhere after the online run is finished and archived at the end of this Summer. He's not making any money, but neither does about 99% of all webcomics.
Project Wonderful uses an auction process for it’s buyers and sellers. If you want to run an ad to attract visitors to your site, you need to compete with other sites doing the same thing. You can do this on a site by site basis (someone can advertise, for example, on one or both boxes on my GirlAMatic site) or you can do it as a campaign. In the latter case, you enter in criteria and have PW bid on your behalf on sites that meet your specs. Personally, I use a combination of both. For instance, I find that I get a really good Q Rating on Wahoo Morris, probably because the two stories are somewhat similar and both Craig Taillefer and I are Ottawa-based creators. 'Course, maybe it's something entirely different. Regardless, I keep on bidding on his site because I like the results that I get.
If we assume, just for a sec, that those 4112 are unique individuals, then my $108.60 ad spend is pretty amazing. Even if it's quarter of that (say 1000 unique individuals), then I'm only spending 11 cents on each person. When I compare that to how much I spent going to various conventions slogging my work (keeping in mind that I went to both the Alternative Press Expo and the Small Press Expo from an advertising point of view and NOT to sell things), it's remarkable. $100.00 doesn't even cover the table costs, let alone manufacturing, travel, lodgings and food. I would never get that type of awareness going to a convention and I've certainly learned my lesson. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Labels: blogosphere, graphic novels, webcomics
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