The sustainability of free content: Learning from webcomics
by Raphaël Plamondon
In this digital era, the Internet has a market of its own that stands out from the traditional market. Since digital products have a lot less costs associated to them, and require almost no middle man, they can be sold a lot cheaper than their physical counterparts, should they cost anything at all. Thus, people have come to expect web content to be free for the most part, which can put the creators of web content in a bind. It may be easier to publish on the internet, but how are you supposed to make any profit from it if it’s expected to be free?
Webcomics, which are comics created and published on the web, give us a model for making money from free content. There is of course the typical ad revenue that comes from putting ads from different sponsors on their website, however the full-time creators of webcomics make very little of their income from those, relying instead on alternative sources of income, such as merchandising for one. They may not make money from the actual comic pages they post, but things based on the comic such as t-shirt designs, mugs, keychains and the like can go a long way if the webcomic is popular. Another benefit from this popularity is that other paid artwork by the same artist will be more in demand. Finally, the creator can also set up a donation service (such as Patreon) which allows fans to support the comic if they wish to do so.
Now, that may sound too good to be true. After all, if the webcomic itself is free, why should people feel obliged to spend money on it? This is the case for most of a webcomic’s audience, where most people simply browse the webcomic, and only the really enthusiastic fans will support it. There exists full-time webcomic authors such as the creators of Questionable Content and Scary Go Round, but in order to get to that point, they had to build a sizable fanbase for their comic to be sustainable. However, it is still achievable to do so, as a webcomic has a few advantages over traditional comics. One, being on the web gives a webcomic plenty of reach internationally, and more people will be willing to check it out and continue reading since the comic itself is free. Second, a popular webcomic usually isn’t renown for using familiar characters and reusing creative licenses, but rather for being original. Standing out allows a webcomic to develop its own unique audience of people looking for something new. Lastly, as most webcomics are a one-person operation, and are also self-published, all the revenue goes to the creator.
Of course, that requires the creator to put in a tremendous amount of effort into something that can take years before making a sustainable income, meaning that the author is doing the comic on his own free time before then. People making webcomics full-time are very determined and persistent individuals that can stick to a regular update schedule and have keen business skills. Luckily once they start building a fanbase, that fanbase is there to support them, not just financially but also by sharing the comic with others and even emotionally, as there is more communication between the author and the fanbase than traditional comics have. While there is a lot of people that give up partway through, those that succeed show us the possibility of a new economic model, one that allows for sustainable, original content available to everyone.