Karmic Debt Comics

I thought I’d wait for the shite storm to die down before posting this, and it seems to have quieted down for the most part.

Most of you probably already know that webcomics.com has moved to a subscription based business model, and for those of you who didn’t SURPRISE!! That is what it was like for folks who visit the site regularly, one day all the content was free the next they had to pay to see it.

Now before you folks get up in arms about how Brad has been giving away his priceless pearls of wisdom on how to run a successful webcomic business for years now, and how he deserves to be paid for his wisdom, remember he was part of a quartet that wrote this book about “How to make Webcomics” didn’t he get paid for that? Personally all I ever saw the webcomics.com site as was a way to promote the book, “Look here is an article about X, and if you want more info you can always buy our book.”. Which I did, and I thoroughly enjoyed it by the way and I would even recommend it to people.

Brad certainly deserves something for giving so much back to the community, maybe a great humanitarian award or something? For those of you who don’t know I maintain a Renaissance Faire community called NERennies, we provide a place for rennies to meet online and we provide valuable information (via our members) to folks just getting started in this crazy thing called Rennie-dom. Now do I deserve compensation for giving so much of my time and energy to this community? Well, if I were being paid for it I wouldn’t be “giving” my time to the community would I?

I will admit I am not a frequent reader of the site, the articles I have read were interesting but not compelling enough for me to visit more than 6 times a year at best. So the subscription would not really be worth it for me, maybe for others it is worth it.

Now we will get down to meat and potatoes of my issue with this sudden decision.

1. I was slow to coming around to the Halfpixel mindset that subscription walls don’t work but after some very convincing arguments from their side I came to believe they are right about that. One their main arguments would be if it didn’t work for the NY Times what are the odds it will work any where else. Somehow Brad and Co. have convinced themselves that since their site is an information site it will work. I must say that this sudden change of what works is a bit disconcerting to me. Heck maybe micropayments actually will work in this crazy new world we find ourselves in. What say you Brad and Co. care to look into iCents?
2. There are people who submitted articles to the site and now those articles are locked behind a pay wall. You didn’t notify them of this change, and your response has been that all they need to do is contact you and you will take them down? This is not how this should have happened and if it had happened on anyone else site you guys would have been the first to cry foul. This is what I would consider a major violation of trust between the publisher and the author, in my opinion it is the publishers responsibility to notify the author of the changes and ask for permission to use the article. Perhaps there was some clause in the original contract (or whatever passed for one when someone submitted an article) that said Webcomics.com could do whatever they wanted with the article. If there was no such clause then I feel it is the duty of the Publisher to contact each author and obtain permission to use the article for the new version of webcomics.com.  Is this a pain the ass, perhaps depending on how many authors we are talking. Would it be tough to keep under wraps  so word of the impending change did not leak out, most definitely. Do these things change that it was indeed the right thing to do, no they do not.

That in a nutshell is my objection to this change, does it matter a lick? Only to me. Will it change the minds of the webcomics.com folks? Nope. But there are my thoughts on the matter and since this is my site I figure I am entitled to post them.

Have a wonderful day all.

ps: I must say that after reading the comments (all 8 million of them… ok it wasn’t 8 million but there were a lot) I was struck by how easily it degenerated into name calling. Do people not have the ability to debate in a calm and reasoned manner? Gesssh people…