Business of webcomics

Those channels may include selling merchandise such as t-shirts, jackets, sweatpants, hats, pins, stickers, and toys, based on their work.

Some artists start their webcomics without the intention of making money off of them directly; instead, they choose to distribute online for other reasons, like receiving feedback on their abilities.

[2] The strategy of building a business around posting free comics online began in the 1980s, when Eric Millikin created the first webcomic, Witches and Stitches for CompuServe in 1985.

By the 1990s, Millikin had moved to publishing comics on the then-new World Wide Web, but was homeless, living in a car, and working in an anatomy lab as an embalmer and dissectionist of human cadavers.

[3][18] By 2004, artists like Richard Stevens (Diesel Sweeties) and Jon Rosenberg (Goats) supported themselves via sales of merchandise as well as self-published books.

Webcomic creator and TopatoCo employee David Malki stated that "part of that was just realizing that people like lots of things, not just T-shirts.

Some may reach a high degree of success, such as the graphic novel version of Raina Telgemeier's webcomic Smile, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller and remained on that list for over three years, having sold over 1.4 million copies.

Comics author Scott McCloud noted that "the quality [of the Flight book] is so high that once it hit paper, it just became impossible to ignore.

Similarly, Jake Parker went on Kickstarter in order to start his comics anthology The Antler Boy, and he went on to receive $85,532 USD in pledges.

Later that same year, Scott Kurtz started a multi-part storyline in his webcomic PvP featuring Magic the Gathering-creators Wizards of the Coast, as a form of product placement.

Here, viewers were allowed to read a few webcomic pages for free, or pay a monthly subscription fee in order to be able to access the rest.

[26] This "Modern Tales" family of websites created one of the first profitable subscription models for webcomics and lasted a little over a decade, with the sites closing in April 2013, shortly before Manley's death.

[29] Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics) has called the Patreon subscription platform the "most disruptive (in a good way)" service that allows webcomic creators to collect money directly from their readers.

When readers complained about the infrequency of his updates, Milholland challenged his fans to donate enough money for him to quit his day job and work on Something Positive full-time.

[31] For instance, after receiving stacks of rejection letters from various syndicates in 1999, Jeffrey Rowland began publishing his comics on the web and found that he could make a living selling merchandise.

In his book, McCloud argued that people would be willing to pay for access to high-quality webcomics once bandwidth speeds increased and sufficiently reliable and simple payment systems were designed and put in place.

Jeph Jacques, for instance, decided to sell Questionable Content T-shirts for a few weeks in order to "make ends meet" after he was fired from his job, but suddenly found that he made enough money to live from and "never looked back.

Dorothy Gambrell (Cat and Girl) explained that "the business of webcomics rolled along smoothly until the great T-shirt crash of 2008," and that the 2010s offers creators more opportunities than the 2000s did.

Many creators such as Gambrell, Drew Fairweather (Toothpaste for Dinner), and Zach Weinersmith (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) all do work unrelated to their webcomics.