mike weber (5:16 PM on Mon Mar 2, 2009)

Haven't read any of the links (though they're open in BG tabs waiting), but i have to say that the NYTimes has for some time been on a rampage about bloggers quoting their articles, to the extent that i seem to recall that they were demanding payments if you used something like six words, even if it was like "A recent article in the NYTimes says '<a href="Jon_Smurd_blog.com/wet-water-hoax.htm>World-famous hydrologists have concluded that water is wet...</a>' (Click the link to read the whole article)."

mightygodking (5:42 PM on Mon Mar 2, 2009)

So-- was scans_daily a good promotional platform? I'd have to say no. Why? Because it was an illicit group, and had to stay under the radar.

I'd say no as well, but for a different reason - the culture of the group was relatively resistant to active promotion (IE "here is my comic you should all read it"). If somebody else had posted "hey here is this awesome comic about a boxer and it is called The Original Johnson and here are two pages I liked," maybe your hit rate would have increased. I found that, when I was getting hits from s_d for the various comic remixes I did while on Livejournal (and later on my blog), that somebody else posting a link to a remix would always get more response than me doing it.

Vinnie Bartilucci (7:24 PM on Mon Mar 2, 2009)

Do you guys spend any time actively campaigning for article placements, especially for something with such a built-in audience like Johnson? A query letter to Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel is not a ridiculous idea. Even a note to Boxing magazine of the folks at ESPN would be worth a few minutes' time.

Marketing is such an important part of any product's success, and yet so few comics people try them. I'm seriously considering starting a blog called "Crazy ideas that just might work", where I come up with random (and cheap) ideas for comics publishers and stores to get the word out to the mainstream about their products.

Freee Comic Book day is fast approaching, and I've been beating my head against the wall for years now trying to get stores to take a few minutes to get some publicity BEFORE the goddam day, instead of all the newspaper articles and even tv news pieces about it when it's OVER.

Anonymous (4:37 PM on Mon Mar 2, 2009)

No offence but maybe your web comics just didn't appeal to that demographic of readers?

Angelophile (4:57 AM on Wed Mar 4, 2009)

A) Unit sales have actually been increasing, not decreasing, so you fall at the first hurdle there.

B) As said above, maybe people just didn't like your comic. I was a regular poster there and I never heard of it, so, apparently it may not have the widespread appeal you think it did.

C) Also as stated above, you're confusing Scans_Daily with a promotional tool. As Warren Ellis has stated, it wasn't somewhere that could be /used/. Someone posting their own work was often looked on with less enthusiasm than someone posting something and saying "I think this is really cool."

Personally I don't believe that the site had the HUGE impact some are attributing it with. I think it was a site unique on the net which had SOME impact. A significant one? Not on big titles, but on a few minor titles which were well loved? Maybe a little. Blue Beetle, I'm looking at you.

Georgia Romig (10:21 AM on Wed Mar 4, 2009)

I agree that scans_daily wasn't really effective as a promotional tool. However, I also think it's not a good idea to compare them to The New York Times in terms of effectiveness. Of course NYT would get you more hits - they cover a larger community. I wouldn't be surprised to find more people read their paper and visit their web site than the readership of the comic news blogosphere combined.

Lemon (11:53 AM on Wed Mar 4, 2009)

I agree with mightygodking that self-promotion tends not to work as well as recommendations from an uninvolved party. I think it was hard for a lot of people to get past the "look at me!" implication of linking to one's own comic.

Personally, I really enjoy myself a good webcomic, but I don't think of them the same way I think of mainstream comics. I expect punctuality, high talent and consistency from a monthly book. The work schedules are structured. It's hard for creator-controlled webcomics to guarantee any of that - quite often, writers/artists lose interest or life gets in the way, and their comics don't update for month and months, if ever again (No Pink Ponies?). Or the writer and artists get in a tiff, and one replaces the other with somebody inferior. Seeing these same patterns play out time and again in webcomics I've read has made me extremely hesitant to try new ones. (Plus, slogging through multiple years backlog doesn't sound like fun to me, but I'm one of those people who prefers series to have endings in sight, so that might just be an individual peeve)

Aside from that, there's always the chance that people weren't interested in the subject matter of the comic in question, of course.

But that doesn't mean that you don't have a good point: a limited community doesn't translate to widespread exposure. While the amount of articles being written about scans_daily show that it was known by more than just its official members, I don't think that all of the people discussing it have necessarily visited on a regular enough basis to have contributed to any increased interest/exposure for some of the post subjects, namely webcomics.