SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks
smbc-comics.com
smbc-comics.com
> This is the third webcomic, among the ones I read, that has quit Hiveworks in the past month. Anyone know what’s up with that?
What were the other ones? Any material changes from the Hiveworks folks that prompted this?
There was a rumor going around that Hiveworks is having financial issues, linked to a post that was then taken down and vagueposting from the DotL person. When I saw DotL move, I figured it was personal drama, and when I saw the one rumor post get taken down, I figured it was inaccurate to the point of being lawsuit material, but SMBC is kind of a big deal. If the rumor is anything, I wouldn't be surprised if SMBC is causation instead of response though and the SMBC move is driven entirely by the annoying ads / shop issues mentioned in their post. Most webcomics do not make a profit.
My personal guess, though, would be that Hiveworks wanted creators to sign an updated contract that had some terms around feeding their stuff into genAI and creators who could are NOPEing out of that.
I cannot overstate how much comic creators don't want to touch managing any of this, so n=2 or more of them leaving in a short window is a really, really bad smell.
I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message to call his bank.
Due to the experiences of countless others like my father, the FBI now recommends folks run an ad blocker.
But if everyone did, then the whole thing falls apart right? If Google or Apple built a great ad blocker into their browser and shipped it with the next update, content creators would respond pretty damn quick right? Everyone from SMBC to the NY Times would put all of their content behind a paywall, or in an app, or something else that's worse than the status quo right?
sigh
Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses are built based on online ads. A LOT.
The real nightmare is hundreds of thousands of people on six figure salaries wasting their lives producing ads everyone hates.
So, nah. It's significant but not "nightmare fuel" even if online advertising entirely went away. (Which nobody is proposing, by the way.)
> As of December 2024, Meta Platforms had 74,067 full-time employees. This is down from 67,317 in 2023
lol. At least Gemini doesn’t make the same mistake for its makers:
> As of 2024, Alphabet, Google's parent company, has 183,323 full-time employees
Of course that’s total headcount, I couldn’t find figures for just US based SWEs.
And in the US alone there are something like 200-400k SWE+IT job openings and 7M openings across all sectors.
Verdict: after the dust settles, it would be a net benefit for everyone to get those bright minds working on real problems.
And nothing of value was lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSGVk2KVokQ
> So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded.
Not even.
Market Cap is more like net worth than like GDP, GDP is more like annual revenue (both are still somewhat different, hence "more like") — Meta's global revenue is $164.5 billion, Alphabet's is $350.02 billion, so even if that's entirely in the USA (it isn't), and the money spent was purely positive-sum (it isn't), even combined that's less than the US military budget of $849.8 billion.
I mean, their other comment was:
> If we'd lose so much GDP, without losing anything of value, perhaps GDP is not a useful measure of the economy.
Meta etc., can pay taxes on the profits made from connecting advertisers to eyeballs, but what actual value do they really provide? What real value gets created due to this, that would otherwise not be created? If Meta is just moving money around, without helping more stuff get made, then whatever measure says "Meta is good" is a poor measure. Even Meta's taxable income would just become someone else's higher profit or cheaper goods.
(But: I presume my belief that ads are zero-sum, or close to thst, is correct; perhaps this is untrue).
The "attention economy" is stealing people's time, then trying to sell it. Other people's cognitive resources are not yours to sell. (Are there really people who do not realise how cartoonishly evil this is?) Time was, people used to pay for big books full of advertisements. Would anyone pay to receive modern online advertising?
The advertising companies are a big part of why I don't have the money to spare to pay for "ad-supported" websites: I'm too busy trying to keep my personal life away from their mass surveillance systems, missing or declining opportunities in the process. I, and those around me, would be richer if not for this pointlessly-wasted effort, me establishing increasingly-impractical countermeasures to maintain my privacy, and them building increasingly-elaborate workarounds to spy on me anyway, all so they can try to sell me a washing machine.
Banksy put it best. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Banksy
> People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
It’s a similar analogy to global warming/fossil fuels IMO. As long as we don’t care about the somewhat invisible co2 part of it slowly cooking us to death, it’s awesome.
Creating economic activity doesn't justify harming people and it has become thunderingly obvious that titillating and outraging viewers constantly to maximize ad impressions is harming the public.
But then I’ve lived through 3-4 major downturns so far - and seen the ‘oh shit’s land.
We had alternatives to those things, when we banned them, after all. Or didn’t ban them at all, just taxed them more.
The consequences of addiction are huge, and the longer you stay addicted the worse it gets.
In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can remember were serious labors of love, especially the early "hacker" communities. But, we lost that internet a long time ago. I, personally, would love for an internet that could emulate those early years of being able to log in, communicate, and make friends with random, sometimes sketchy, weirdos, all within 45 seconds of dialing up. There weren't algorithms that decided who was important and who wasn't, you just had your words and wits.
That was a tangent, but my point is - would the internet improve or decline if there was a serious "adpocalypse"?
These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of your own pocket, I think, so the barrier to entry is higher.
I'm skeptical of this. There's likely some open source software that's good enough and considering the advances in hardware likely much cheaper to run then it was way back when.
Besides the fact that many people prefer large platforms like reddit or Facebook or discord where they already have an account (don't have to make another one) I'd say the problem is the human one not software. Time and effort to popularize the forum and either paying for moderation or convincing people to volunteer to moderate and deal with inevitable shitshow that comes with moderating controversial topics even if forum isn't really related to them.
One bit of feedback I got repeatedly from users on a couple communities (now dead) I helped run was how much harder posting image and video content in a forum is - true user generated content I mean, not shared from YouTube. Even that meant ricking around with bbcode.
As of 2024, there are approximately 4.88 billion smartphone users worldwide, accounting for about 60.42% of the global population. The number of smartphones in use globally is around 7.21 billion.
The global smartphone penetration rate was estimated at 69 percent in 2023, up from 2022. This is based on an estimated 6.7 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide and a global...
A number of people have more than a single phone.
Moderating and managing the forum is the pain.
Also, it can be fairly corrosive to personal mental health.
I recently had an old acquaintance reach out to me, asking me to revive one of my old communities, that was killed by Facebook. This person argued that many of the old community members were now thoroughly sick of Facebook, and would want to go back to the dedicated forum.
I politely declined, and was surprised at how the idea really horrified me.
I never once noticed the site was slow. But now that cloudflare is blocking me and my non-corporate browser completely, no matter how many captchas I complete, it is very, very slow (dead).
It's shocking to me as someone that runs multiple websites (for the last 20+ years) that they're having so much trouble suddenly. I too see bot traffic on my sites increasing (ie, it's like 4:1 now instead of 1:1 bots:humans) but it is not a problem.
I have to wonder how much of this is a socially contagious hysteria. Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years. I get the feeling people are "having" to block bots from accessing their websites just because they "feel" they have to block them. They actually don't.
Your budget tier VPS provider on the other hand has only really doubled what you get over the last 10 years, and user feature expectations and AI scrapers really have caused resource usage to more than double.
The cost efficiency has really only benefited the middle end here really. HN is probably cheaper to run than it was 10 years ago. But the large sites are on cloud providers who have provided added services that you might not have used 10 years ago to keep up their margins, and the intro tier VPS that "Bob's Friendly phpBB Forum" might be on isn't getting you much more, which matters when Bob's revenue is $60/year from a handful of the most investigated regulars only.
If sites just embedded their own ads, then no ad blocker would be able to catch that at all because there would be no way to identify them separately from the content.
We'll use AI
The NYT already puts its content behind a pay wall, and SMBC (as of this update) doesn't rely on third party ads either. So it's not clear that something else would be worse than the status quo for them.
Some content creators would certainly suffer, but if online ads were not normalized, others would thrive.
The fundamental problem is that you can't grow an audience all your content is behind a paywall. So you have to offer some content for free, but if you're an independent comic artist like smbc, no one is going to visit your site if only 1 comic per week is free.
But if a lot of creators are behind a single paywall, and that paywall was able to feature 10 random free webcomics every day, then you pull in lots of visitors and have more opportunity to convert them into paying customers.
Now the harder question, how do you convince a bunch of independent content creators to band together behind a single paywall.
The Japanese-style "phone book sized" manga weeklies/monthlies are the manifestation of this idea. Technically it's not a "free" teaser, but if you buy the issue for one or two "known" series you want to try, the rest is shoveled into your hand for free.
It also provides a good stickiness factor-- if you originally bought the magazine for one or two series, hopefully you've glommed onto others by the time those end or you lose interest in them.
There’s zero chance I’m going to subscribe to every site that I might hit a few times a year.
b) You can always follow a combination of free (unpaywalled) content + premium content behind a paywall/Patreon/etc + merchandise + Kickstarter for more ambitious projects.
The big drivers are (1) ever more increasing inventory (ie page loads/refreshes/whatever with ad slots). Relatively fixed demand plus increasing supply gives you a price fall that has been going on for 10+ years with no end in sight, combined with:
(2) retargeting has gotten endlessly more sophisticated allowing people whom advertisers wish to target to be found on places with cheap inventory.
You need immense numbers of pageviews or to be very high value to some specific audience. As an example of the latter, somewhat generically: imagine people really into high end watches. There are buyers for that. Or your site is valuable to eg vacation intenders.
It's why more and more sites (Defector, Talking Points Memo, 404, all major newspapers) that wish to, you know, not die are charging subscription revenue.
Anecdotally, I’m paying subscriptions for news sites (mainstream and niche) and podcasts I would not have had a few years ago. I subscribed to YouTube, which I thought I’d never do!
I’m not sure what to make of this. Microtransactions and subscriptions powering creators has been a dream of many people for a long, long time - at least since the 90s. So maybe this is great? But even if it is, something has been lost too.
the limiting factor is that you have to opt out of a lot of the ad industry. That means transaction costs are high. iow, you have to be super valuable and have a ton of traffic because buyers have to buy from your site by name and often by doing actual work to make the transaction happen.
So this strategy can work, but you need enough volume for it to be worthwhile for the buyers to overcome the cost of working with you. One of the big things exchanges and google offer ad buyers is a low friction experience which means low costs to place a lot of ads.
if you're unfamiliar with the ads, imagine either (1) plugging $50k into whatever demand side platform (dsp), such as google/criteo/the trade desk/adobe/etc and being done; vs hand selecting even 50 or more sites; working with their ad ops to get ads up and running; monitoring 50 different individual budgets, etc. It's just a lot of work on both sides.