

Creating a New Business Model for Cartoonists - gk1
http://www.gkogan.co/blog/creating-new-business-model-cartoonists/

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egypturnash
This is, specifically, a business model for single-panel cartoonists.
Strippers may be able to use it, graphic novelists like me definitely won't be
able to.

gk, you might get some useful ideas from looking at
[http://www.cagle.com](http://www.cagle.com) \- it started as Daryl Cagle's
personal site but it's morphed into pretty much a political cartoon
destination site, complete with a similar licensing thing.

Also worth looking at: Brad Guigar's webcomics.com, or just grab his two books
on making a living from comics. He's tried a lot of things over the years
doing a strip.

There's also the subscription model. Usually this is the domain of porn, as
"being able to buy stuff on the net" currently tends to overlap with "is old
enough to look at drawings of sexytimes". Slipshine
([http://orgymania.net](http://orgymania.net)) is a good example of this; it's
got a constant stream of work from a lot of cartoonists.

Hiveworks
[http://thehiveworks.com/index.php](http://thehiveworks.com/index.php) is also
interesting; they have an ever-growing network of longform comics. There's a
lot of cross-promotion, and a few people whose jobs are solely to deal with
maintaining sites, buying external ads, and whatnot. They claim to be able to
get a new artist up to making a living off their comic in about a year now.

Personally I'm doing a mixture of Kickstarter and Patreon right now; I'm a
graphic novelist, and my work is best read in chunks at least the size of a
chapter, if not a whole story. So I use Kickstarter to fund printing a pile of
books for existing fans, and to sell to new fans at cons and online, and I'm
starting to experiment with using Patreon to get paid by the page.

..I didn't mean for this to be a long post talking about other successful
business models I've seen in cartooning, but here we are! Good luck with your
gag cartoon syndicate, gk.

~~~
darklajid
You should totally link to your work. HN encourages self-promotion and damn..
I went to your profile, found a single link to a .. well .. graphic novel(?)
and was blown away.

Amazing work, I'll see if I can get my hands on the previous release somehow.

~~~
egypturnash
Yeah, graphic novel is the right word. Thanks! It's at
[http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/](http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/) to save other
people who may be curious from going through those multiple steps; it's about
a robot lady who's dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend.

You can order a copy of volume 1 (of 3) from my online store, 2 is at the
printers after a lot of delays, mostly on my end, mostly because seasonal
depression.

~~~
andrey-p
Love the use of infinite canvas and colour. (I haven't managed to go through
it all yet, but it's been bookmarked for later reading.)

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gk1
Just want to add: This was inspired by Patio11's documentation of Bingo Card
Creator over the span of several years. I learned a lot from reading that, so
I wanted to do the same with this project. Any questions or suggestions on
what to write next are welcome!

~~~
patio11
Thanks, hearing I helped someone get into business always makes my day.

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shutupalready
For anyone who wonders how stock photography sites stay in business (it seems
like a marginal business), I have a true story for you:

A friend of my spent weeks doing the graphics for a national marketing
campaign for a new laptop (I think it was Dell).

The laptop maker selected 6 photos from a major stock photography site to put
into their ads. The photos were _totally_ innocuous. We're not talking about
the photo of the student trying to stop the tanks in Tiananmen Square. The
photos were, for example, a smiling woman sitting on bicycle, a guy jumping in
the air with his arms open.

The laptop maker $60,000 to license the 6 photos. (My friend got $7,000 for 7
weeks of work.)

I'm not sure if my story makes a point, but it seems like you have to price
discriminate severely at the high end (really soak companies like Dell) and
not expect much money from the _New Yorker_.

~~~
gk1
You raise a good point. Someone in the comments here asked how I arrived at
the current price structure, and my answer was basically: price
discrimination.

For the time being I just have a contact link for companies with >501
employees, but maybe in the future will have some sort of automated pricing
structure even for them.

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learc83
This looks similar to what happened to the stock photography business over the
last 10 years with the rise of microstock websites.

The field really opened up to a lot of then amateur photographers who couldn't
sell to one of the big name stock agencies.

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abat
Looks like a great idea. One comment though. The preview pages load slowly for
me because all the cartoons are loaded at full resolution (800px width) and
then greatly scaled down and cropped on the client (to around 253px with).
Browsing pages full of cartoons would be much faster on my slow TWC internet
if you could serve prescaled comics.

~~~
gk1
Thanks for this suggestion. I'll get this done as soon as the tide of visitors
gets through... Don't want to break anything right now!

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svmegatron
This is a really cool concept and looks nicely executed. Great work! Please
keep us posted on progress if you can.

I'm interested to know how you decided on pricing being based on # of
employees in the organization. Can you expand on that decision?

~~~
gk1
Thanks!

Ah, licensing fees... That is a mysterious and strange world of pricing, and
deserves a full post of its own. It's still something I'm trying to nail down,
and will document it as I do.

Quite simply, it's price discrimination. I arrived at these numbers by
imitating what others are doing and adjusting slightly based on my own
assumptions.

A large company is assumed to get more utility out of an image than a small
company, is therefore charged more. For example, if a large company uses a
cartoon in a newsletter, that newsletter is presumed to have a larger
circulation than the smaller company's newsletter.

I'm not convinced this is the best pricing structure to go on, but I decided
to start with this and improve it as I go along. Will certainly write about
this process (and results) soon.

~~~
mbesto
This is great. What about a "blogger" subscription plan that is affordable for
an individual like me? As someone who blogs frequently and would like to
incorporate more imagery, I think I could convince myself to pay something
like $30/month to use 4 pictures a month. (one per week)

~~~
gk1
Love that idea. Since I'm using Stripe for payments, this should be fairly
straight-forward to setup. May I email you an update when this is available?

~~~
lleims
As a blogger I'd also be interested in this. Email is in my user profile :)

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tptacek
This sounds like an awesome idea. Really clever.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
What have I missed - isn't it "just", as he intimates, a cartoon focussed
version of a stock photo site?

FWIW I didn't find it particularly hard to find business type cartoons on
shutterstock,
[http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-807910p2.html](http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-807910p2.html).
There prices are £29 for 12 downloads (for small/med jpeg - for comparison
with the post about using images on a personal blog).

[I've used them in the past for some website art and may have an affiliate
link somewhere for them, can't recall]

I'm not saying it's bad, seems to be nicely executed; just that a few comments
seem like "wow, totally awesome concept" which make me think I'm missing
something?

~~~
tptacek
Yes, I think you are. You may be paying too much attention to the technology.
Two clever strokes in this idea:

* Identifying huge excess inventory in the market for cartoons and generating value from it

* Positioning cartoons in a manner similar to premium fonts, for bloggers and online publications

I have in mind (it's not my idea mind you) a Javascript blob one would stick
on their blog, like you would for the HF+J fonts, and then an interface for
picking cartoons (or themes of cartoons) out for individual posts.

~~~
gk1
> I have in mind (it's not my idea mind you) a Javascript blob one would stick
> on their blog, like you would for the HF+J fonts, and then an interface for
> picking cartoons (or themes of cartoons) out for individual posts.

Is there an example of this, or could you please elaborate? I'd love to
explore this idea.

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____miah
Cool. Cartoons meet stock photos. The problem I'm seeing is that some cartoons
sometimes are tightly coupled to a specific topic, and may be seasonal.
Especially current events/politically/socially related cartoons and satire.
IMHO.

~~~
gk1
Great point, and I'm dealing with that issue by bringing more cartoonists
onboard (tapping into their unpublished cartoons). I'm looking to double the
inventory within a month and then 10x it after that... I want 90% of keyword
searches to result in at least 5 cartoons.

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peteforde
I think that this is great, and I'm definitely excited to use this for my blog
posts in the future.

That said, I am hoping you bring on a few dozen of your peers because right
now your comics are heavily weighted towards certain categories. Diversity
would be a huge asset.

My only suggestion is that you make the images on the "View all" substantially
bigger so that you can scroll through all of them and read the captions
without squinting. I found myself using the back button a lot.

~~~
gk1
Thanks Pete! I hope you do use a few.

As you may have seen in some of the comments here and on the article, people
are requesting a subscription option (eg, pay $xx per month to use up to N
cartoons each month). Would you pay for something like that?

> Diversity would be a huge asset.

Good insight, and I completely agree. That is why I brought onboard a second
cartoonist, and will be inviting more soon. Within the next month I hope to
double the amount of cartoons, and then 10x it the following month.

> My only suggestion is that you make the images on the "View all"
> substantially bigger so that you can scroll through all of them and read the
> captions without squinting. I found myself using the back button a lot.

Thanks for that suggestion. I always wondered what's an ideal size to make the
thumbnails, and whether to allow page scrolling (next/prev when you're on an
individual cartoon page), but this is the first time someone's mentioned it.
So now it's definitely on my to-do list.

~~~
peteforde
I suspect that a subscription system would make some very happy, but I'm an
informal blogger and I'd prefer to pay a bit more to use them when I need
them.

As far as feature requests go, I suggest keeping it super simple for a little
while until you get a sense of which ones are "I have an idea" vs. "I can't
use this unless".

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spindritf
Great idea.

 _You 'll automatically get a high-quality image file of this cartoon._

What is the resolution? I also can't find the text of the license.

~~~
gk1
The downloaded cartoons vary from 1200px wide to 1800px wide, so large enough
to look nice and sharp in almost any publication or blog. If you're looking
for something larger (say, for a billboard ad), just get in touch!

I'll be adding the license terms some time soon, thanks for bringing that up!

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chrisyeah
Do you recieve a commission when other drawers' cartoons are sold?

(And one thing: If you sell your cartoon to a magazine which doesn't allow
further publishing then you still have the same problem for this cartoon to
not be able to publish/sell it again. But for your other (not sold to a
magazine) cartoons this would definitely be a benefical platform.) I think
your idea could be working ;)

~~~
gk1
Hey Chris, thanks for the note.

Yes, the business model for _me_ is that I receive a percentage of all
licensing fees, while the majority goes to the cartoonists. (Currently about
3/4's of the cartoons there are mine anyway.)

Regarding the issue with magazines: They don't care what you do _after_
publication, they only care that they're the _first_ to publish it. So you
have it slightly in reverse. :)

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drawkbox
Love this idea and the execution, comics are definitely taking that step into
iStockphoto territory which is so great for cartoonists. The web really opened
up lots of comic artists and revenue models. This is also happening big time
with 3d assets on stores like Unity Asset Store.

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DocG
Hi It is awesome!

I wish you would add small FAQ about how to publish on your page. Even simple
"How to submit?" "Currently we are sadly not accepting new work. You can
always subscribe and we will let you know when things change" would be cool

~~~
gk1
Hey, thanks! Thanks for the suggestion, I'll add this very soon.

In the meantime if you have single-panel cartoons to submit please shoot me an
email (greg[at]gagcartoons[dot]com)! I'm definitely looking to expand the
inventory with high-quality work.

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_pmf_
I think there is a very, very viable opportunity for something Steam-like for
comics.

~~~
egypturnash
[http://www.comixology.com](http://www.comixology.com) kinda does that? It's
very much about single issues, rather than larger completed works.

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carterschonwald
Awesome! I may at some point get one or two

~~~
gk1
Great! I added a special deal to the post:

> "This week only, HN visitors and everyone else get a 2-for-1 when you
> license any cartoon on GagCartoons! How to get it: Just license any cartoon,
> then email me and tell me which second cartoon you'd like."

~~~
carterschonwald
thankee. I'm trying to not spend needlessly this month so I'm afraid i'll have
to miss out though.

good luck though!

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hayksaakian
It would be nice if you had a subreddit and published new entries to the
subreddit.

You'd have a nice way to highlight popular cartoons, and i'd have a new source
of funny/interesting content.

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dalek2point3
two questions:

\- can any cartoonist sign up to sell cartoons using this platform? \- can you
allow cartoonists to sell under more permissive licenses like CC-BY?

~~~
gk1
Hey Dalek,

> can any cartoonist sign up to sell cartoons using this platform?

There's no automated system to manage this, but it's in the works. Right now a
cartoonist has to email me and tell me they're interested in posting their
cartoons. Then I'd batch upload their cartoons and get them all set up.

Are you interested or know someone who is?

> can you allow cartoonists to sell under more permissive licenses like CC-BY?

Hmm that's a good question. I haven't thought about allowing artists to set
their license options, but now I will think about it.

~~~
dalek2point3
Great! good to hear that you're thinking about. I would definitely urge you to
offer a range of licensing options -- flickr, youtube and all major content
hosting platform have supported this in the recent past, and I can tell you
from experience that it will help you build momentum among a certain class of
both cartoon producers and consumers who care about this stuff. Thanks!

