Comic for Monday, September 19th
Sep19
I think Tyler doesn’t really like Rovak. Not sure why. Just a feeling.
Miko has missed naptime. It’s been a long day.
I’ve been testing out a new comments system. Some of you may have seen it’s brief roll out on the comments section for the comics, but I did revert that for the time being. It will probably come back. Unfortunately it doesn’t have the functionality to edit comments as guests that we currently have, so I’m currently weighing the pros and cons. You can see it on any of the pages that have comments that are not comics. The nice part is preserves the archive of comments, so it’s not a hard roll out. I would like to keep a way for people edit their comments, but we will see.
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Mid-archive binge: *across* the table
on the commenting thing, as long as guests can continue to comment editing is leas of an issue. I speak only for myself, but I usually only notice typos after the editing window has expired.
I will live the ability of guest commenters to comment regardless. I prefer to keep a way to edit, may make it so people have to login for that – as long as it’s possible for the people that want it. The current editing is just not very good anyway.
Glad to see Miko is still being Miko! ^^
Miko-ness (the possessing traits or displaying characteristics of Miko) is an intrinsic property of Miko after all.
I had to double check I was not on a blog post like three times, as most the comments were about ads and things. I guess I of all people really can not criticize people for being off topic.
This looks like the start of an uneasy alliance. A very uneasy alliance. This alliance seems less stable than a Kally-Mium-Ila alliance. This one seems almost guaranteed to end in fireworks. Though in the short term Miko and Rovak want the same thing of getting out of the building, Rovak would be better off if Miko and Tyler do not make it out of the build too.
It seems like Miko has had some bad experiences with the outdoors. That may have something to do with her selection of friends though. I imagine proximity to Peter’s brain-child of a plan and the probability of something exploding is pretty direct.
Miko may have a bad experience with the out of doors, but I’m not sure whose to blame between the out of doors and Miko for that…
I think the less said about who Miko is, the funnier.
SERIOUSLY HOW DOES MIKO GET FUNNIER WITH EVERY APPEARANCE!?! The math literally shouldn’t work and yet it happens anyway!
If you end up doing quotes for characters on the cast page can I vote for Miko’s venting in the second to last panel being it? Her rant at the armored soldiers probably wouldn’t fit, but that might, and lo, it is glorious.
I think Miko has never really had to bow to the social conventions of politeness or discretion. She spends most of her time online where she is basically untouchable being a talented hacker with maybe the best AI in the business as her friend.
She has just carried this over into real life and so far as has gotten away with it. Now maybe she is also untouchable in real life, as she certainly acts like it.
A side of effect being that she pretty much spouts pure entertainment value.
Miko was never meant to be outside the Miko-cave. It doesn’t suit Miko well.
It suits fourth-wall observers very well. 😉
So… I am about to ask a question that was spawned by your answers to some other questions… Sorry.
You touched base on the fact that this is not your full time job, and I respect that and that this is very much a learning experience before it is a source of viable income (for now at least), however, I still have a question.
Do you at least make enough from ad revenue and patreon to cover the cost of making the comic? Servers aren’t free any more than the tablet and technology needed to draw the comic, so, I am [not] simply curious [there may be more to it].
It depends on how you count the tablet and time. The comic does cover server and domain registration costs. If you consider my tablet is 7+ years old (…yeah, it didn’t get much use for a few years here and there 😛 ), it’s basically amortized by now, sure, as I didn’t even explicitly buy it for the webcomic. Could I afford to replace it off what I make on the comic currently? Definitely not.
There was a time when I was making a good bit more, but between the decline of Google and PW banner ad revenue (the one banner directly under the comic makes most of the money the ad money of the comic) and taking off the donate button I am probably making about 40% what I made at peak (this is not entirely unique to me, there is a bit of a lull in how to monetize webcomics – adblock becoming very popular, google focusing on video and mobile ads, and the decline of new backers entering the Patreon ecosystem).
I think Patreon is generally the future of webcomic models, but there is a lot of competition and limited resources. Plus a lot of it is people that do this for their living and/or are very talented. Patreon works best for people interested in the art (either super high quality, part of a fandom, etc).
Please note none of this is intended as a complaint or a discouragement of webcomics as a hobby/side job, purely as informational context to people that are interested. I use to write blogs about this and what I learned trying to make a comic profitable, but that was back in the days where I had a little more time for this 😉
Thanks for answering 🙂
I have actually disabled my adblock since learning that they were going to start charging companies for the right to ignore adblock(I mostly used it for youtube anyway).
Am plotting a comic of my own(hence my rather personal question) with a close friend. Kind of Sky High meets Heroes, with more humor…
Well, my advice would always go for it if you enjoy doing, but don’t count it to pay your bills, especially if you are splitting the proceeds. I think a partner in crime can be a huge motivational help though, especially early. I don’t think I would have kept publishing this one if I hadn’t gotten a few early readers (even if that was never really the point for me, it’s a lot easier to get distracted and move on if no one is watching 😉 ). There are a lot of side income streams (commissions can be a big one if you have a professional or semi-professional artist) but it is just not going to be a realistic primary income source.
That said, I think the market for webcomic is still growing, and more novel ways of monetization will come along; there is a bigger issue at stake in that society in general needs to figure out how want to pay for infinitely redistributable items, from video games to webcomics to anime & tv shows, I think we are in the midst of an economic shift that is currently hard to predict.
… but now I’ve sort of gone beyond the scale of the matter at hand. I say go for it! 😛 Let me know when if / it’s online 😉
” I think the market for webcomic is still growing, and more novel ways of monetization will come along; there is a bigger issue at stake in that society in general needs to figure out how want to pay for infinitely redistributable items, from video games to webcomics to anime & tv shows… ”
I agree. More people are making webcomics. But I think awareness and readership is still growing. Also, Kickstarter and Patreon are two such innovations. And I predict that, eventually, TV webseries will catch on, luring away part of TV Networks’ viewership. Already, streaming media services like Netflix are eating away at old entertainment giants.
The comic probably won’t be online for a while yet, as we’re still brainstorming ideas. The main reason though, is that neither of us is in a position to produce and/or keep up with the comic. That said, we are both preparing to change our respective living situations in a definite, if distant, future… Thanks for your interest 🙂
” I have actually disabled my adblock since learning that they were going to start charging companies for the right to ignore adblock… ”
Charging companies for not blocking adblockers? Who? Everyone’s ISP companies? That doesn’t make sense.
” Am plotting a comic of my own(hence my rather personal question) with a close friend… ”
Are you splitting the proceeds?
I don’t actually know much about the whole adblock charging to allow ads thing, but I do know there was some fuss. An article about it. Please note I do not actually know if this is accurate.
Supposedly they charge companies like Google and Amazon to allow ads through under certain criteria. At this point there are a lot of different ad blockers, so I’m not sure this is true of all of them.
“…this is not entirely unique to me, there is a bit of a lull in how to monetize webcomics…”
From what I’ve read, some webcomics have given up entirely on Google Ads because there’s virtually no money in it anymore.
“…adblock becoming very popular, google focusing on video and mobile ads, and the decline of new backers entering the Patreon ecosystem).”
I’m sure adblocking and a shift to video and mobile ads has a lot to do with it. But I wonder if ad spamming outfits are partly to blame for Google Ad’s drop in revenue? You know, the dark underbelly of the Internet, like ad farms and sites with multiple pop-under ad windows and junk?
I imagine that is a large reason that Google has moved to YouTube, mobile, etc, as banner ads are fairly easy to exploit at very least.
Frankly banner ads are just fairly low tech advertising for most of the major players, and it’s really hard to monitor your network. If I advertise I would never just place catch all bid on Google networks as you’ll get eaten alive by scam sites.
The catch of this is that a lot of other bidders would do the same – focus on high traffic well regulated environments. This is why ad networks and large sites have a vastly greater per-visit payout as well as much higher visitor count.
This makes how to advertise for small sites a challenge, especially with Project Wonderful not nearly as strong as it once was with the major webcomics almost universally pulling out, it struggles to attract much market.
I am hard pressed to be sad about the concept of banner ads dying off, but it does pay for my hobby, so… mixed feelings I guess. Plus, it’s not like that money will stop being put into marketing, it’s just marketing that’s less accessible to little sites.
I would really like to see lower barriers to monetizing online content, but there is a long way to go in figuring out a way that makes sense. For now, I think opt-in monetization (either by Patreon or choosing to load the ads) is the best compromise, just not a very profitable one 😉
I do want to be clear that I’m not going to tell anyone they should or shouldn’t use adblock, just giving some insight into numbers and trends from my perspective.
While I do use adblock, there are a few that get around it (that aren’t blocked by the “allow nice ads”) that I don’t mind. I’ve no idea what Project Wonderful is like to deal with as an ad service site-management-wise, but they get by my adblock and I see no need to block them. I occasionally click or recognize where they lead to, too. (And not, like, unhappy recognition.)
Oh, and as for comment systems, again, no idea what Disqus is like site-load-wise, and I know it’s annoying to work with on mobile (though disabling javascript I recently learned doesn’t hurt the phone nearly as bad as letting it load Disqus properly), but it allows edits, can lock pages for comments, lets you know from anywhere Disqus is loaded….no idea if you’d like it or not from your perspective, just know it’s somewhat useful in my experience.
(Oh and Patreon-wise mostly it was first who I noticed had it got me first, can’t unsub from them without feeling like a bit of a dick, and I can;’t afford to sub everyone, soo….yeah.)
(PS: Arrow-keys for nav is awesome, but when it goes off in text boxes. eww.)
Disqus is a good comment system, but the deal breaker is that I would have to wipe all of my comments, and that’s not really an option for me.
To be clear, I’m perfectly fine with people using adblock on my site. I sort of despise ads. If people load them, that does help me, but I’d rather have an extra reader than someone annoyed off by ads.
Patreon is a great model, but that tends to be the issue with it; it needs a constant influx of new blood, as only a very small minority can reasonable support more than one or two things, and most people like a lot of things on the internet.
I actually used to make more money from donations than Patreon largely because it doesn’t carry the same level of commitment to most people I think, but ultimately I felt bad about donations once I wasn’t self-employed, while Patreon I view as at least a vehicle for more content as well as more reliable gauge of interest in bonus/more content.
I only go into the general details because of reader interest and my general need to generate endless walls of text 😉
I’m not sure what you mean with the last bit about arrow keys.
Does a switch to Discus really necessitate wiping old comments? Depending on how website code savvy a person is, I thought there -might- be a way to keep an old comment system on old pages and have a new system on all new pages. I’m not very savvy, though. It was merely a guess on my part.
Write a comment. Try to edit it. Use arrow keys to navigate the text in the box. (Doesn’t apply for writing the actual comment.)
The comic itself can be navigated by using arrow keys to go from page to page (using left & right), and regular “write a comment” text is the same. But try editing a comment and it’ll instead redirect to a different page, cancelling whatever you were editing. (The Patreon bit was edited in and took three tries, only had about 60-90s for the last try because it kept messing up.)
As for Disqus, dang, that’s kinda annoying. There’s no way to try archiving the old comments anywhere? Maybe just dump them into the page’s blurb up above or maybe in a spoiler tag so it’s not 3 essays before rest of comments? (Thinking I knew of another site that converted to Disqus and it was a pity that all the comments went away, but thought some of them at least were stashed somewhere to be found. Can’t remember now, was kinda a while ago.)
“Disqus is a good comment system.”
For Disqus.
“but the deal breaker is that I would have to wipe all of my comments, and that’s not really an option for me.”
I, for one, hope you never go to Disqus.
For me, a webcomic’s comment section is at least as important as the comic itself for both readers as well as the publisher:
• Comments are an essential part of a new reader archive dive and are absolutely necessary for new readers of your comic as there is a great deal of character and world building canon in the comments
• There is a high correlation between quality / number of comments and the quality / richness of webcomic
• Commenter’s many eyes find and point out non-obvious and/or hidden content that would otherwise be missed
• Commenters identify and expand on unfamiliar cultural references that might be crucial to the understanding of the story and which enrich the entire webcomic experience
• Commenters often discuss topics and post links to related material – again adding to the overall positive experience
• An active comment section creates community among the readers which leads to repeat visits and reader involvement.
• Involvement leads to reader emotional investment in and attachment to the cast and story
• Emotional involvement is the single most important indicator of reader retention
Overall, reader comments are an asset that is as important and as valuable as the comic images themselves.
With Disqus you lose all ownership and control of your user comments:
• The comments are physically located on Disqus’ servers, not yours.
• You might be able to capture and save user comments but it would be a lot of extra work and a lot of extra bandwidth.
• You are totally dependent on Disqus’ TOS, viability, continuity and business model
• You become locked in to the Disqus service and vulnerable to any changes
• There is a tremendous loss of privacy for your commenters – especially when Disqus monetizes user comments
• You will lose a large number of readers/commenters who (like me), boycott Disqus for privacy let alone other reasons.
So keep the system you have and continue to put your efforts into writing and drawing a great webcomic.
Don’t worry, as noted, a solution that wipes the comments is not really an option to me (why I was in such a frantic state back when the site got hacked and they screwed with my database). I really appreciate all the people that have invested the time in the comments, and the community that’s built from them. This comic would probably have died a long time ago without the comment community here, and I – as much or more than anyone – appreciate that they are a huge value add to the comic.
That said, the issues with Disqus being a privacy concern are new to me, thanks for bringing that up – to be honest I don’t know much about them beyond that they are one of the more popular comment solutions for webcomics, and that the solution I use currently is imperfect (mainly with the “arrow keys while editing problem” being the big one).
I do see these comments on old pages, and I know future readers well as well, always appreciate them, and of course the, comments really are part of the comic. 🙂
” While I do use adblock, there are a few that get around it… ”
I don’t use adblockers because I want to support webcomics and sites I frequent… except for YouTube. They just don’t listen to their userbase. It’s not merely because they have ads, but the way that they do things. I’d switch to Veoh or Vimeo in a hearbeat if they had competitive features and a lot more videos.
Also, on my laptop, I don’t always update Flash in a timely manner, because updates are very frequent and because my laptop is old/slow. Until I do update, my browser auto-disables flash. (Try running some 20 tabs of pages with flash ads on an old Centrino processor. It’ll have my laptop beg!)
I do run adblock and forget to whitelist things (and often I’m not there for long anyway). Because there’s a lot of crap out there that’s extremely annoying to deal with. Like those redirect ads that then try to trap you and maybe make loud annoying noises and make it hard to get out of their traps (which never feel like they have much point anyway)? Some of those get around adblock sometimes (though I’m not on such sites often), but that’s just the ones that get around adblock. I really don’t want the hassle of dealing with the ones that do get blocked. The fact that such ads exist in the first place should be some kind of crime. They’re evil.
And if it’s not that, then there’s pages that have so many ads that it slows down the page actually loading, and/or are harder to load than the actual page. It’s not that I don’t want to support specific people – such as creators of content I like. The problem is the nature of the ads some people (I don’t know about here, I’ll be honest, haven’t tried lifting adblock here yet, just usually here to see 1-2 pages, maybe blurb a comment, and gone), but ads could slow that down. And then say I leave a tab open for forever (which I’m prone to do), that tab could end up eating up massive amounts of memory. (Which I notice sometimes even WITH adblock.) Don’t want my computer crapping out because of too many ads trying to load at the same time. (And then they start trying to do a new segment in the background possibly slowing down what I’m trying to do myself and that will be annoying etc etc…)
Plus some sites (especially news) feel like more ads than content sometimes. And they load the content last. This may be an influence as to why I don’t read the news very much anymore….
I have so little use for Flash that I’ve set it as “Ask to Activate” in my browser (FF). That way, ads etc. can’t use Flash to annoy me or slow things down, and when I do want something Flash-based to run, I just need to click on it first. But for me, that’s rarely enough that the extra click isn’t a problem – I suppose it could get annoying if you need it often.
I have flash disabled by default as well. I used to have a job as a software engineer working with Flash/AS3… so… maybe a little paranoid 😛
In the olden days this didn’t work very well, but now with html5/js running most things, flash is pretty much only used for self-contained components that I don’t really want to run by default. It isn’t going to break my heard if an auto-play video or something doesn’t run on page load… 😉
Just to provide a counterpoint (showing that not everyone loves it) – I usually find it annoying when I discover a site is using arrow-keys for nav, even when implemented “properly” (not being active in editing areas) – because I generally only discover it when trying to use the arrow keys to scroll sideways (on a low-res screen), and the site instead navigates me away from the page I was trying to read.
(Of course, it not being implemented properly (triggering while in a text editing area) just makes it worse…)
I started to run adblock once I became a Patreon. I unblocked it for awhile to “support” the site, but decided that did not make much sense, as I loathe ads, never click them, and I do not think PastUtopia makes much from them.
I think Patreon needs a better “micro” subscription model. While I really like this comic, I would gladly give like 5-10 cents an update to a lot of comics, but I do not think that makes sense on Patreon with how it is charged and fees and things. Five thousand people giving 5-10 cents an update would be more a lot, and if I am being frank that is sort of the level of value most webcomics provide.
It’s funny you should mention that, as that’s one of the things that I tried to build back in my old self-employed/start up internet media days. Unfortunately it is a little complicated. There are a lot of hurdles, and at the end of the day for that model to make sense it has to sort of snowball into something pretty big.
I think that the incarnation this will take is a cross-site, cross multi-media like button, where “liking” donates 5 cents. The problem with this sort of model is makes media theft a bigger problem – not a problem for webcomics as much, but a big problem for videos.
But yeah, microsubscriptions or mircodonations are definitely part of what I think the future is. Even a couple bucks a month is more than most people can reasonable afford to spend on a webcomic (considering they probably read 5-10 on average), and the more the burden of support can be spread out, the more people are likely to get on board. These are the sort of things I was talking about above when I was saying that I think big changes are coming to the sphere, but I tried my stab at this and, well, lets just say I work for someone else that pays me a salary now 😛 (though to be fair my focus was developing games… an even less likely to be profitable venture! )
Poor Miko, bribed out of her room to fix one of Peter’s plans and the world around her starts blowing up. 😛 Still she does have a good point, as right now Rovak has a need that only Tyler can supply. Even if Rovak can’t be denied an exit, Malsa still has contact to the IDS so I’m sure he would be willing to give up some info in exchange for a headstart.
Miko is definitely regretting a life decision here. The outdoors is just not safe. Loud, bright, full of explosions, squabbling mages, and morons. Do not want.
For some reason I think the last one is the big one. And the rest are little straws that stacked with it have broken the camel’s back.
Hahaha~ ^^ I don’t think the rest of it much registers with Miko. Only Miko would blithely walk into a group of fighting mages to yell at them for being an inconvenience.