As if DC’s retailer meetings haven’t been offering up enough information about the upcoming September relaunch so far, today’s retailer report on Bleeding Cool (from the owner of Warp 9 comics in Chicago, IL) has one particular piece of information that I don’t think has ever been released before:
Print Comics Outsell Digital 630 To One.
For a long, long time now, people have wondered exactly how many digital comics are actually being sold for publishers, and what kind of profit that could bring in for them. Now, with this piece of information, calculations can finally start being made based upon more than just randon guesswork. But still: 630 print sales for every digital sale? No wonder publishers are reticent to do anything further to upset direct market retailers, with that kind of ratio…
(Consider, also, that digital comics don’t contain ads, so that revenue isn’t available for the publishers in that format. Although, to be honest, I fully expect ads to start appearing in digital comics as the industry starts moving towards that model more and more.)
June 28th, 2011 at 10:19 am
So, essentially, they sell approximately 160 digital comics for every 100,000 hard copies sold? Or $478.40 in revenue, assuming a selling price of $2.99. Of course, that 630-to-1 number may just be first month’s sales of the select titles they’re already doing day-and-date for.
But I think this part is just as interesting…
“The best was DC offering to retailers increased sales revenue of digital copies of their titles (through comiXology) if they have a stand alone DC comics portal (kind of forcing a retailer to get a website). They realize that we (the direct market) are their primary bread & butter (for now).”
(And, while they may not have ads, digital comics also don’t have printing and distribution costs.)
June 28th, 2011 at 10:36 am
I.. think they milked that number to appease the retailers, no?
June 28th, 2011 at 11:15 am
Matt D.
Actually no. that’s about par with what Filip Sablik at top Cow once told me.
June 28th, 2011 at 11:22 am
That’s a hell of a vicious circle they’ve created for themselves then.
June 28th, 2011 at 12:07 pm
Print outsells digital 630 to 1… for now. It doesn’t change the fact that all print markets are shrinking beyond the point of profitability and none more so than comics. Change has to come from somewhere and it’s more likely to come from digital. Or, heaven forbid, not at all, in which case the only trend is down.
The only thing this number communicates is that the current aging, diminishing market for comics is averse to new technologies and unwilling to think ahead to the needs of future readers and hates change in general. We KNOW that WE hate digital. In other news, water is wet. Make comics for the generation coming up instead.
June 28th, 2011 at 1:03 pm
D. Peace: I would actually agree with you, except for the fact that you seem to assume that “digital readers” automatically equates to “paying customers,” and if you honestly believe that, then welcome to the Internet, because you’ve clearly never been here before.
Yes, the generation coming up DOES prefer to consume their media digitally, but especially if you’re doing insane things like charging almost as much for a digital comic as for its print equivalent, there’s absolutely no reason for any of them to BUY any of those issues.
Print outsells digital, but does anyone seriously believe that online purchases of comics exceed non-paying downloads of those issues?
June 28th, 2011 at 1:03 pm
“Print outsells digital 630 to 1… for now.”
This.
It wasn’t but a couple of years ago that everybody was convinced that there was no money to be made from e-books. That e-books would never take off.
Anybody who made that prediction was completely and utterly wrong.
Digital sales will improve IF publishers give them a legitimate chance to succeed. And, unlike print, digital may actually bring in new readers.
June 28th, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Of course print copies outsell because digital isn’t available until much later and sporadically at that. Once comics go on sale day-and-date digital and people start purchasing tablets, the digital numbers will increase. I can’t wait for DC to go day-and-date.
June 28th, 2011 at 1:50 pm
While true, the numbers are suspect, because the same titles aren’t simultaneously available in both print and digital. By the time most books become available for sale digitally they’ve been available both in print and as an illegal digital download for weeks if not months.
June 28th, 2011 at 5:32 pm
I, too, find that ratio incredibly suspicious. I personally haven’t bought a print comic since I got an iphone two years ago. My $100+ itunes bill every month proves that i’ve been buying quite a few more comics than i would have regularly. But yeah, hardly of my purchases are day-and-date releases, i buy full runs of Captain Britain, Atomic Robo, Irredeemable, and classics like Batman: Year One and Mutant Massacre.
Of course, if titles like amazing spider-man and FF were day-and-date i’d be spending a LOT more money.
June 28th, 2011 at 5:32 pm
630 to 1 today.
What was it six months ago? What will it be in six months? Sales are interesting, but rate of growth is more of the real story.
Also, is this ratio all releases or just day and date releases? Day-and-date sales will continue to struggle unless companies bend on forcing the universally loathed 2.99 (and 3.99) day-and-date price point. Day and date Atomic Robo is only $1.99, and by all accounts that book has flourished on the digital platform.
June 28th, 2011 at 6:38 pm
I’d like to know the rate of change; how much of that is foreign or domestic (i.e. to what extent is a local complementary/competitive market being built or is the market just expanding to previously underserviced areas), how much of that is repeat business, how the repeat business behaved over time (did repeat customers expand their purchases over time because they were pleased with the digital experience, or decrease it), what time frame they determined the numbers in, how fast print is diminishing, what kind of digital books were being purchased (e.g., continuity heavy or continuity light, limited series vs. ongoing, etc.), any demographic information associated with those transactions (is that even tracked or allowed to be tracked?), how many transactions were from lapsed fans vs. new readers vs. current readers, how many providers those sales are flowing through, and what it’s like to be hugged in a loving and affectionate way by a Sumo wrestler. For starters. Thanks in advance.
June 28th, 2011 at 8:47 pm
“It wasn’t but a couple of years ago that everybody was convinced that there was no money to be made from e-books. That e-books would never take off.
Anybody who made that prediction was completely and utterly wrong.”
Bingo. The Kindle is Amazon.com’s highest-selling product. And remember when Napster, the original Napster, was all the rage and millions of people were literally stealing whatever they wanted, as much as they wanted, for free? In those days, naysayers came out of the woodwork saying iTunes would never work. iTunes DID work and people DID pay for their music downloads.
I can’t guarantee DC’s new initiative will be a success but to pooh-pooh it right out of the gate is way premature, given the general public’s track record of gladly buying digital product legally and securely and conveniently instead of enduring the poor quality and virus risk of illegal downloads.
June 28th, 2011 at 11:30 pm
However, the ratio of digital comics pirated to print comics sold runs between 2:1 and 20:1, depending on the book. $2.99 digital comics aren’t going to eat into that, but $0.99 digital comics would. Using the iTunes model rather than the Kindle model is where the success lies, I’m convinced.
June 29th, 2011 at 11:23 am
D. Peace: Jim nailed it right after you on the price point.
If DC started charging 99 cents per issue, they’d actually be dangerous, since people are willing to pay 99 cents for three to five minutes’ worth of entertainment, which is about how long it takes to read most modern comics.
The problem is that DC, presumably in an attempt to appease the direct market — which they still need to do, at least until print no longer outsells digital by a 630:1 ratio — is charging as much for their digital comics as for their print ones, and if that was how music was sold on iTunes, it never would have taken off.
Of course, the other side of this is that audiences who don’t currently read American comics are going to expect a lot more content than the average print OR digital issue provides, if those new readers have ever read any manga.
This will necessarily require the end of Bendis-style talking-much-but-saying-nothing dialogue scenes in comics, but DiDio’s proposed solution of huge Image-style splash pages for the artists to work with won’t actually add any value either.