Digital Comics Platforms, Part II - Costs to Build a Comic Content Management System

Triggered by Diamond's order minimum increase, my last post discussed the cost structures of the digital comics platforms built by the top three comics publishers. I concluded that the most cost-effective business model is to pursue a strategic alliance with another media company that understands how to build large online communities. Crunchyroll and Myspace are two companies who are good at what they do.

Of course, not every publisher is in a strategic position to convince media companies to build custom sites for the publisher's content. Nor can many pay $50k a month to roll their own custom solution like Zuda Comics. In this blog post, I'll evaluate some of the existing options out there.

My favorite alternative is actually a favorite of many webcomickers. It's the ComicPress and the ComicPress Manager plugin for WordPress. Tyler Martin and John Bintz have done an excellent job making their software easy-to-use. The technical expertise required to run such a site is relatively minimal and there are a lot of tutorials on the web. Tyler also runs a webcomics consulting business and he's actually themed a lot of very popular webcomics using ComicPress. The only downside is that you will need to arrange your comic like a webcomic. It's not necessarily a bad thing as many comic fans are well-acquainted with the quirks of webcomics systems.

What's nice about ComicPress is that you can start slow and release pages of a single series onto the web, a page at a time. You can even do it with the most basic ComicPress installation. Most people only really care about the content; the theme and webdesign is just the wrapping paper. By giving people new content every few days and buying cheap ads at Project Wonderful, a publisher can very quickly build a loyal fan-base numbering in the thousands. Then you can try to cross-sell books and merchandise from your online store or printed books on one of the print-on-demand publishers. The most important thing to do is to keep tabs on conversion rates to see what can be improved.

If the comics are rated PG-13 or less, Kidjutsu is another good choice. Besides being very easy to use, our comic book reader is also especially tailored for standard tall comic books. One of our favorite features is that embeddability of the comic reader. Check out our reader in action below or on Mark McKenna's Banana-Tail site. You can also read the Banana-Tail illustrated childrens book series on Kidjutsu.

For those interested in using our service, you can contact me at brian@kidjutsu.com. Just include a link to your comic and I'll send you more information about our service and our plans for sharing profit.

No matter how much or how little you spend, it always takes time to get a website going. That doesn't mean publishers should wait though. The earlier you start the better position you will be in two or three years down the road.

I have only covered a subset of the possibilities and I expect a lot of exploration to happen in the next 2-3 years. I believe most of the innovation will come from creators and small publishers. After all, these are the people who are scrappy enough to survive tough markets like the comic book market in its current state.

Also see the Digital Comics Platforms Part I blog entry.