Comics / Digital Comics

Is It Necessary To Go Web 2.0?

By Hervé St-Louis
December 23, 2008 - 00:34

One thing I have noticed in the last few years is that comic book publishers have increased the places where they promote their books. A typical comic book company and its products are no longer promoted exclusively at the publisher’s Web site. There’s this gimmick called Web 2.0 and increasingly, through Web sites like Facebook, MySpace, ComicSpace and so on, comic book publishers, like their equivalent in the music, film, and video game industries are reaching out to their customers on other platforms than their original Web sites. But is this approach to selling and promoting comic books and related products online effective and profitable?

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many comic book publishers tried to build portals out of their Web sites. They wanted their users to find everything they possibly needed and even in many case purchase products right on the spot. Larger publishers with extensive distribution networks, tended to favour promoting their distributors and retailers network, but the effect was the same. Publishers tried to make a sale while presenting their products to their customers and competing for their limited attention span and discretionary income.

Source: Myextralife - 02-19-2007. Copyright Scott Johnson. http://www.myextralife.com/archive.php?date=2007-02-19

To keep existing customers and potential readers, they built huge message boards where they encouraged their visitors to visit and stay long. They tried to build captive audience. They even offered news coverage as an excuse to keep their visitors longer. Since 2006, the year when Web sites like YouTube, Wikipedia and blogs became popular, comic book publishers have extended their reach to new online venues.

MySpace which was created as Web site for users to post personal pages and create a network of virtual friends has slowly given ground to independent music bands and artists trying to reach a larger audience. Instead of being the social networking Web site of kids who did not go to college, MySpace became the hip place where the outsiders of the entertainment industry could try to peddle their offerings. The momentum created by the so-called independent artists was so great, that the so-called major came on and started promoting their latest Hollywood productions on MySpace. Nowadays, it is almost unheard of for a major Hollywood blockbuster or recording artist not to have a MySpace site as well as its original Web site.

The popularity of MySpace influenced many in the comic book industry to quickly adopt the first alternative offered just for this industry, ComicSpace. Although ComicSpace offered a poor interface and options compared to better funded competitors, it was the comic book industry’s first and therefore received more support than its mediocre interface merited. Thousands of professional, semi-professionals and enthusiasts created pages on ComicSpace and continue to maintain them to this day.

But just when everyone thought they had all their based covered, Facebook became a hit with more privilege college-bound kids and slowly allowed other groups to join. Facebook is continually reinventing itself and one of the things it has done is to add Facebook Pages, mini-portals that are more extensive in features than Facebook groups, allowing the company to compete directly with MySpace and allowing Facebook users to keep some distance between themselves and the rest of their potential audiences.

Currently the latest craze is for political groups and a host of other organization, beyond the entertainment industry, to create Facebook Pages for themselves. Entertainment companies and comic book publishers are sure to follow. The Comic Book Bin, like many other Web 1.0 Web sites, followed suit in many of these new developments. When social bookmarking turned into a rage, we were the first comic book-based comic book news site to allow our users to use that feature on our site. We even created a beta social bookmark site long destroyed, called ComicBookMark.com to create an engine that would allow our users to bookmark relevant comic book stories on the Web. Like everyone, we also use Twitter these days, having long stopped refreshing our ComicSpace Web page or maintain our internal Comic Book Bin Facebook group. We have even have a MySpace page which is continually still-born. As someone who worked for a Web 2.0 start up and even hired an MBA to write up the first business plan for Web comics distribution portal way back in 2004 and decided it wasn’t worth the effort after getting the initial business plan’s findings, I have to say that I’m suffering from Web fatigue.

What is Web fatigue? Web fatigue is that continuous need to keep on top of every new development online to offer your audience the latest and greatest in what you think they are interested in. If I suffer from Web fatigue, I can only guess that comic book publishers and other firms with extensive Web presence must be totally wrecked by now. In hindsight, it may not be useful to pursue the latest and greatest Web fad and stick to the tested and tried classics of good promotion.

If you publish a Web site today, there is no reason why you have to create a secondary presence on MySpace, Facebook, create a separate blog, moderate a message board, have a Twitter account, a ComicSpace page while trying to find a way to post video clips on YouTube. It’s not commercially viable and with the impending economic crisis, it’s not a good business decision. It’s time to cut back on the feeling that you need to occupy every social networking niche and older communication areas such as message boards, in order to better reach your target customers.

Picking one channel as your exclusive unfiltered communications tools is probably a more viable strategy to reach potential customers. Moreover, news sites, like The Comic Book Bin are still thriving and continue to serve a unique function – disseminating information. However, message boards and MySpace pages were designed to circumvent that function by getting a message across as unfiltered as possible. The part about the filter and the total control of the message is what has always influenced firms and political groups to try to circumvent the media and reach out directly to the masses.

While the need to control the message is greater today than in the past, this need has to be balanced against other imperatives such as economic efficiency. When Marvel and DC Comics “abandoned” Newsarama and Comic Book Resources as their main promotional mouth piece in favour of MySpace, they knew what they were doing. They focus their promotional strategy on one channel instead of another, while reinforcing their own offering at their Web sites. It hurt Newsarama and Comic Book Resources, but also gave them the opportunity, if they wished to be more critical of their former partners.

Whether using MySpace makes business sense for Marvel and DC Comics is another question. I personally think it does not, because eventually, MySpace will lose popularity and it will be replaced by another place to go, such as Facebook Pages. All the investment will have to be reinvested elsewhere. I’m also doubtful that Marvel and DC Comics’ natural audience includes many MySpace users. I’d wager that there are more of them using deviantArt, but I digress.

Web development is in continuous changes. However, with the worldwide economic slowdown, businesses have a good opportunity to evaluate the bottom line of their Web expenditures and ascertain whether or not the strategies they use to promote their product have long time efficacy and profitability. If they cannot prove efficacy or profitability, then they should reconsider their strategies, before the next generation of cool Web applications and fads, like mobile Internet device computing become mainstream.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12