CBR Live! Archive
Thoughts on the Viability of Comic Book Websites
- by Brian Cronin
- in General
Don MacPherson has a great piece up about the news that ComicMix.com is scaling back their operations, and what does that mean for the viability of a comic book web site in today's economy?
- Posted on November 11, 2008 @ 06:01 AM
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3 Comments
Scott Johnson
November 11, 2008 at 8:17 am
CBR has proven that a site can flourish in the online comic book news arena. Sure, advertising might drop some during a recession, but with a solid product and a solid demo, CBR (and other well run sites) will be just fine.
At Comicbook.com, we're taking a different approach to comic book news. We believe there is a ton of great news out there already, so there was no sense in us competing with folks that do it right. So we went the Digg route and decided to be partners with everyone--publishers, content sites, etc--so the user ends up winning.
It's a model that has proven to work, and we're excited about the potential.
Greg Hatcher
November 11, 2008 at 9:14 am
Jonah was very, VERY patient about CBR. It was a hobby for a long time, and I suspect that to this day he's not really living off it so much as he is Boiling Point Productions, overall, of which CBR is just a part. I think the key to success in this area is "multiple revenue streams." Our boss had the luxury of experimenting, which is to say he was able to put up first-draft versions of CBR to tinker with and gauge public reaction to, without the ticking time-bomb of running out of capital that seems to face so many of these other startups. They all seem to come with a profit-or-bust expiration date.
Well, all business come with that, I suppose. But ours is a case where you need a significant buy-in by the same people reading all the other stuff. I read ComicMix for the columns; I just wasn't that into the webcomics, not even the revivals of old faves like Sable. But the columns I enjoyed a lot. If they're gone, there's nothing there really that I'm not getting from other sites. For them to scale back and concentrate on news seems odd to me; news is the one thing that EVERYONE is doing and most do it better than ComicMix.
Jack Norris
November 12, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Yeah, I see no need for more news sites. If I find out about a site with interesting new opinion columns, or reviews where someone has a unique take on things, I'm there right away. Tell me "hey, here's another news site to check out" and it'll be ages before I go take a look, if at all.