Monday, August 27, 2007

#100 - Making money on the web

Its our 100th blog! Whoopee! Well for the few of you that read this, thanks for coming along. I'll take some time this week to decide whether its fun or not. We only had 10 visitors last week so it must not be but so much fun to you all!

I was listening to NPR on the way back from Ohio yesterday. They had an interesting segment on the first web comic strip. Cartoonist Pete Abrams started a comic strip web site 10 years ago called Sluggy Freelance. Now I've been to the site several times and I'll be upfront and say, I don't get that type of comic. However over 100,000 people differ with that opinion every day. I'm more a Peanuts and Dagwood type of guy. But Mr. Adams has made a living through his web comic.

He tried using advertising, but it took too much of his time and never made enough to be worth the effort. He tried charging for site access, but then ended up with almost no viewers. He finally hit upon a combination of commercial products and site extras to make his living. You can by Sluggy Freelance dolls, T shirts, buttons, pins and books from the site. If you want to see more then the basic comic strip you can subscribe to full access of ad free browsing [Defenders of the Nifty Subscription], exclusive content and of course the Sluggy Freelance blog (as an aside, maybe I should charge for my blog?). This combination makes Abrams financially secure enough to raise a family and live comfortably.

Just another way to make a buck on the Web. Interesting.

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