Bad Machinery‘s John Allison considers the state of the modern webcomic:
There are people who put all their work up on Tumblr, and don’t put it anywhere else. It’s so easy! Drag and drop! Their comics exist, contextless, in a stream of other people’s work. They’re measured by a meritocracy of Notes, Re-blogs and hearts. They have little control over the environment in which their work is displayed. Pageviews on a website are how you make money. A website is a venue to curate your work. It’s how you get someone to PAY ATTENTION TO YOU AND ONLY YOU.
Art isn’t democratic. It doesn’t take place in a caring, sharing environment. It is a huge “look at me”. We are the pre-schoolers who can still point at what we’ve done and get a sticker, and we want to keep getting those stickers forever.
I would never decry any service as worthless. There are people who have caught mass attention via Tumblr, and sold great piles of things as a result. There’s a use for everything, and an exception to every rule. The exceptions are the reasons that others try. But Tumblr sets the bar of success incredibly low. The payout will almost always be zero. Not beer money, nothing.
The whole thing is well worth your time. Go, read.
March 6th, 2013 at 2:52 am
The reason I put together the Baujahr site originally wasn’t even for payout (it’s been nearly two years, and we’re lucky if we pull in spare change each month); it was because the reading experience for people on Blogspot was just pisspoor. Tumblr seems much in the same boat.
I can see using Tumblr like a DeviantArt site, to get people to see your art, share it, use word of mouth to build up interest in it and hopefully drag eyes to your site. It has value. And the community of sites like that is a great thing indeed. But, unless you’re strictly doing single panel/page gag strips, it’s never going to lend well to storytelling.
What Tumblr is, though, is free and simple to set up. That can be pretty enticing when you’re getting started.