I recently saw someone bring up a point about low traffic webcomics and advertising: if you only earn pennies a day from ads, why dilute your content and cause reader distraction by implementing ads when you gain very little from them?

Advertising is a sticky subject in the comicking community. Some swear by them, others against. Some despise ad blockers and ask their readers not to use them while others think that is tantamount to whining and that readers should be able to browse the web however they please. There doesn’t seem to be much of a consensus on anything ad-related when you get right down to it.

I’m a believer in using adverts early on a site. If your site design isn’t made to incorporate ads from the beginning, it just means that a small site design is needed down the road to implement them. I worry about annoying site viewers by trying to change too much on the site too often. Once I get a design in place, I like to keep it that way for awhile and if changes are made, it’s because people complained and wanted a change. And in my opinion, if you plan to monetize the site, you may as well get it out of the way right off the bat so readers don’t have a footing to complain about it down the road when you start placing ads into an already-established website.

When it comes right down to it, I don’t understand people who complain about advertising in the first place. This is a free website and if ads are done correctly, they shouldn’t impede the viewer experience on a site. It’s a win for everyone around… the readers have a free place to visit and the owner recoups a small amount for the effort put into the site on a weekly (or more often) basis. To use this site as an example, I made it so when readers are reading the comic, advertising is pushed to the background completely and can’t even be viewed. I can see how pop-up ads, content-blocking ads, and spread-all-over-your-damned-screen ads are annoying but I don’t see the point in denying content providers their simple, unobtrusive ads to get back a few bucks for hosting and their own advertising.

Anyway, just my opinion and I’m sure it’s biased because I run several websites that host advertising. As long as the provider tries to avoid annoying the viewer with obnoxious ads that clearly block the content that he or she is attempting to view, I have no problems with advertising.

I’m surely going to touch on it more in the coming months but I’m thrilled to be heading to San Diego Comic Con in July. Last night, I started thinking about it some more and while I want to attend several cons this year, I’m still not sure in what capacity I’ll be able to do so. When it comes to drawing and printing, I have many years of experience to fall back on. When it comes to site design and implementation, I started coding sites a decade ago and know my way around HTML, CSS, and PHP pretty well. When it comes to marketing the site, I have my five or so years of marketing experience to use as a baseline on how to proceed with a coherent strategy. When it comes to actually sitting down and talking to a real, live person about the comic book, well, that’s a different matter entirely. Under the best of circumstances, I don’t like talking about my creations much and clam up pretty quickly. I have no idea how trying to talk to a complete stranger about it is going to work for me. Eep.

That’s about it for this week’s blog. By the time this posts, I hope to be back on track and drawing again. Teh dizzies have held me back from getting much accomplished over the past several days and I really need to start pushing forward again if I plan to stay on schedule.

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