Switched has picked up on the story that the New York Times reported (and Caleb linked) a week ago: the death spiral of the print newspaper spells trouble for cartoonists.
Last month, I attended a lecture by Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism about the future of journalism. As in the linked essay, he pointed out that people are not turning away from news–that the top newspapers have more readers now than they ever did. Those readers just happen to be online.
One of the things Rosenstiel talked about was the “decoupling” of news and advertising. Why would you buy an ad to sell cars in the New York Times for a ton of money when you can advertise on a website about cars, where more of your audience will be interested in your product?
Targeted advertising is the wave of the future with ads. And news is suddenly driven by targeted searches, Google news finder, and Twitter feeds.
We’re seeing the decoupling of comic strips from news in much the same way. As the articles pointed out, comic strips are moving to the Web, to their own sites, and to different sources of funding.
Though we’d love to see a world where all artists were able to do exactly what they want for the love of it, the practical fact is that we’ve all got to eat. As the media deals with the shift to the Internet, one of the biggest questions is how to survive as an artist–or a journalist–when the Web has everyone expecting content to be free all the time.
We at Blog@ are going to bring you a bunch of stories about webcomics this month, and we hope to be able to help answer some of these questions.
February 28th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I have been observing the same trend over a period of time. That is the reason I did not even try to get my comic strip syndicated in the traditional way. This means, however that I can’t devote as much time as I would like to the development of my comic and may result in it never reaching its full potential.
My hope for the future of my comic strip is to be able to fund it through the sale of books, but that process takes a relatively long time when you have to build an audience from scratch first. You can say that I am an artist (using the term loosely here) that is doing what he is doing for the love of it, but has to keep a day job to put food on the table.
I could not agree with you more into the big question looming over all of our heads: “how to survive as an artist when the Web has everyone expecting contents to be free all the time”.
I hope that my venture will help provide at least a [partial answer to this question, but it is way too early for me to tell, becasue my strip has been online for only two months. My eventual (finantial) goal with it would be to finance it through book sales and specialty items. That, of course would require a relatively large following, since not everyone who reads your strip is going to become a paying customer.
In addition to the items mentioned abovem I have also considered other sources of income such as advertising, product placement, membership fees, microfinancing a la Scott McCloud and others, but have not settled on anything specific yet, since buiding an audience has to take precedence or all else would be fruitless.
Good luck with your ventures, and you are welcome to check mine. Who knows? Maybe you like it.