Thursday, May 19, 2005

Bitchslapping the fans

I was over at Comixpedia earlier, having a look around the forums and someone was asking for advice, after finding that people were posting his comics on their sites without his permission. Now he actually didn't seem too perturbed by the whole thing, mostly because it was driving extra traffic to his site. Still, he felt the need to ask for advice on the matter. It's a fair enough concern really, considering these people are chewing up his bandwidth.

However, some people's reactions seem just just a little reactionary - you've got to stamp it out, violating your copyright etc etc. It's like the music industry's reaction to file-sharing. Instead of making the effort to adapt to a new technology, they lashed out and ended up treating genuine fans like vermin. Except, with webcomics it's not a case of adapting to a new technology. It's the technology that's been there from the start. It's the technology that webcomics have been built on. We've received huge amounts of traffic from people posting our funny cartoons on their sites or in forums. Occasionally some one hotlinks us and we could get narked about it but we don't know that we're not getting traffic from it. The point is that the person liked our stuff enough to want to show it to other people. Why should we bitchslap them for that? Realistically, how many of these sites are likely to crash yours? And even if it starts to become a problem, why not find some polite way around it. I quite like discovering that one of our funny cartoons has turned up on some fishing forum somewhere or that some lass, from the other side of the same city I live in, is using one of our toons in her sig in some forum she frequents. It means we've succeeded to some degree and that's what we want. Now, of course, it can be a problem if your main source of revenue is based on people turning up at your site but, in the end, all that means is you've found a flaw in your business model. Sorry but that's life.

I noticed today that Stephen Cloud is trying to get Boy on a Stick and Slither published. It's one of my favorites, so if you know of any newspapers or magazines that'd be interested, why not drop him a line. Otherwise, just drop by the site and have a look through the archives. It's grand stuff, like.