It's getting pretty grim out there folks.
Revenue generated for 2023 campaigns so far
On the face of it, a gross increase of +4% between this year and 2022 is not bad. Not great but not bad. Then you factor in that both
Cyberfrog 3 and
Jawbreakers 5 were both launched this year and collectively Comicsgate has only managed to tread water, then it comes off as really bad. Only when one removes Frog from both 2022 and 2023 does what's happening become apparant. The separation between short head' and long tail (that is, the threshhold between significant and average CG campaigns) has gone
from $50,950 in 2020 to around $23,900 in 2023. What that means is that the median CG comic no longer generates enough money to be a feasible profession and, at most, becomes an exercise in hobbyist self-publishing indistinguishable from the rest of the indies. If Cyberfrog 3 goes from 1.2 million to 500K, Frog isn't starving. If a 60K campaign goes to 30 however, that may break the business. Since one of the main tenets of Comicsgate is that bowing to the woke is not necessary because one could go independent with the help of 'da movement', the debunking of this claim presages a deep reduction of and shift in the motivations of the people willing to remain a part of it. As we're already starting to see. Only eight creators have cleared $50,000 this year, with Vito Gesuldi being the most prominent Comicsgater making original material other than EVS.
Looking at the graph of the top 40 campaigns of this year so far, one might think FundMyComic was a ghost town of a platform. Not so. In fact,
more creators have signed on with FundMyComic this year so far (86) than
Indiegogo (64, the lowest on record). But while FMC may have more CG campaigns hosted on it than IGG, FMC campaings have brought in less than 1/20th of the revenue that IGG campaings have. Why this is is not exactly clear. It could be FMC's courting of creators exclusively leaving them with a consumer protection policy about as robust as a condomless sex romp through Port Au Prince. It could be the reluctance of major CG creators to cover, bring traffic or lend support behind the platform in any meaningful way, or that the ability of CG's ubiquitous 'chlll and shill' livestreams as a means of driving traffic to sites over mailing lists has been severely overrated. Or maybe all of the above. Whatever the cause, it spells nothing good for the prospects of smaller creators.
Dumb question: Do sites like
https://www.fundmycomic.com/about have any chance of succeeding, in or out of Comicsgate?
The costs of setting up and maintaining FMC are very small. Enough to be covered with a 5% take on ~100K of funds raised, so I don't think it's going anywhere any time soon. That it took some guy who spent half a year in a medicated COVID coma like Luke Stone, who's five digits in the hole after the Target comics grift, to do it really goes to show how little effort has been put in by the 'leadership' towards advancing or even stabilizing CG after 5 years beyond Youtube livestreaming.
Simple Zack's latest
get-poor-quick scheme, since I guess the "buy a comic for $1" move with Jawbreakers 4 failed to get backers to return, was to get people to buy two copies for $30. Then his customers can serve as unpaid promoters of his product and give them away to libraries, people they don't like and dumpsters on behalf of Zack. You see, it's very personally inconvenient to Richard C Meyer to have to actually market his own comic, and he'd prefer it if his
fans customers backers would just do it for him instead and free him up for more worthwhile pursuits, like attending shoe store events and tirelessly covering the social media accounts of a handful of low level female Marvel employees. It's sort of like how a dealer gives the junkie the first taste for free, only instead of smack it's a comic where the badly defined characters with no origin either as individuals or a team have to be unkilled using Rick and Morty parallel universe magic because Meyer retardedly killed them off in
G0dK1Ng. Will the shitty patchwork retcon issue bring droves of new readers in to the Jawbreakers universe and start buying back issues to find out the origins and backstory of these characters, which Zack never actually bothered to write in? Meyer seems to think so. What is he going to do when Chuck Dixon wakes up one morning and realizes he sells more comics than Simple Zack now thanks to his appearances on FNT and Eric July's show, and takes Stallone's IPs away?
I do think Frog's pay piggies will Gobble this garbage up though.
