Creating a New Business Model for Cartoonists
gkogan.co
gkogan.co
gk, you might get some useful ideas from looking at http://www.cagle.com - it started as Daryl Cagle's personal site but it's morphed into pretty much a political cartoon destination site, complete with a similar licensing thing.
Also worth looking at: Brad Guigar's webcomics.com, or just grab his two books on making a living from comics. He's tried a lot of things over the years doing a strip.
There's also the subscription model. Usually this is the domain of porn, as "being able to buy stuff on the net" currently tends to overlap with "is old enough to look at drawings of sexytimes". Slipshine (http://orgymania.net) is a good example of this; it's got a constant stream of work from a lot of cartoonists.
Hiveworks http://thehiveworks.com/index.php is also interesting; they have an ever-growing network of longform comics. There's a lot of cross-promotion, and a few people whose jobs are solely to deal with maintaining sites, buying external ads, and whatnot. They claim to be able to get a new artist up to making a living off their comic in about a year now.
Personally I'm doing a mixture of Kickstarter and Patreon right now; I'm a graphic novelist, and my work is best read in chunks at least the size of a chapter, if not a whole story. So I use Kickstarter to fund printing a pile of books for existing fans, and to sell to new fans at cons and online, and I'm starting to experiment with using Patreon to get paid by the page.
..I didn't mean for this to be a long post talking about other successful business models I've seen in cartooning, but here we are! Good luck with your gag cartoon syndicate, gk.
It's certainly interesting to see how other artists are monetizing their creative work... Especially how different types of artists do it (graphic novelists, political cartoonists, single panel cartoonists, strip cartoonists, etc.).
Amazing work, I'll see if I can get my hands on the previous release somehow.
You can order a copy of volume 1 (of 3) from my online store, 2 is at the printers after a lot of delays, mostly on my end, mostly because seasonal depression.
A friend of my spent weeks doing the graphics for a national marketing campaign for a new laptop (I think it was Dell).
The laptop maker selected 6 photos from a major stock photography site to put into their ads. The photos were totally innocuous. We're not talking about the photo of the student trying to stop the tanks in Tiananmen Square. The photos were, for example, a smiling woman sitting on bicycle, a guy jumping in the air with his arms open.
The laptop maker $60,000 to license the 6 photos. (My friend got $7,000 for 7 weeks of work.)
I'm not sure if my story makes a point, but it seems like you have to price discriminate severely at the high end (really soak companies like Dell) and not expect much money from the New Yorker.
For the time being I just have a contact link for companies with >501 employees, but maybe in the future will have some sort of automated pricing structure even for them.
The field really opened up to a lot of then amateur photographers who couldn't sell to one of the big name stock agencies.
I'm interested to know how you decided on pricing being based on # of employees in the organization. Can you expand on that decision?
Ah, licensing fees... That is a mysterious and strange world of pricing, and deserves a full post of its own. It's still something I'm trying to nail down, and will document it as I do.
Quite simply, it's price discrimination. I arrived at these numbers by imitating what others are doing and adjusting slightly based on my own assumptions.
A large company is assumed to get more utility out of an image than a small company, is therefore charged more. For example, if a large company uses a cartoon in a newsletter, that newsletter is presumed to have a larger circulation than the smaller company's newsletter.
I'm not convinced this is the best pricing structure to go on, but I decided to start with this and improve it as I go along. Will certainly write about this process (and results) soon.
FWIW I didn't find it particularly hard to find business type cartoons on shutterstock, http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-807910p2.html. There prices are £29 for 12 downloads (for small/med jpeg - for comparison with the post about using images on a personal blog).
[I've used them in the past for some website art and may have an affiliate link somewhere for them, can't recall]
I'm not saying it's bad, seems to be nicely executed; just that a few comments seem like "wow, totally awesome concept" which make me think I'm missing something?
* Identifying huge excess inventory in the market for cartoons and generating value from it
* Positioning cartoons in a manner similar to premium fonts, for bloggers and online publications
I have in mind (it's not my idea mind you) a Javascript blob one would stick on their blog, like you would for the HF+J fonts, and then an interface for picking cartoons (or themes of cartoons) out for individual posts.
Is there an example of this, or could you please elaborate? I'd love to explore this idea.
That was slashdot editors comment about Apple's new music player, the iPod.
That said, I am hoping you bring on a few dozen of your peers because right now your comics are heavily weighted towards certain categories. Diversity would be a huge asset.
My only suggestion is that you make the images on the "View all" substantially bigger so that you can scroll through all of them and read the captions without squinting. I found myself using the back button a lot.
As you may have seen in some of the comments here and on the article, people are requesting a subscription option (eg, pay $xx per month to use up to N cartoons each month). Would you pay for something like that?
> Diversity would be a huge asset.
Good insight, and I completely agree. That is why I brought onboard a second cartoonist, and will be inviting more soon. Within the next month I hope to double the amount of cartoons, and then 10x it the following month.
> My only suggestion is that you make the images on the "View all" substantially bigger so that you can scroll through all of them and read the captions without squinting. I found myself using the back button a lot.
Thanks for that suggestion. I always wondered what's an ideal size to make the thumbnails, and whether to allow page scrolling (next/prev when you're on an individual cartoon page), but this is the first time someone's mentioned it. So now it's definitely on my to-do list.
As far as feature requests go, I suggest keeping it super simple for a little while until you get a sense of which ones are "I have an idea" vs. "I can't use this unless".
You'll automatically get a high-quality image file of this cartoon.
What is the resolution? I also can't find the text of the license.
I'll be adding the license terms some time soon, thanks for bringing that up!
(And one thing: If you sell your cartoon to a magazine which doesn't allow further publishing then you still have the same problem for this cartoon to not be able to publish/sell it again. But for your other (not sold to a magazine) cartoons this would definitely be a benefical platform.) I think your idea could be working ;)
Yes, the business model for me is that I receive a percentage of all licensing fees, while the majority goes to the cartoonists. (Currently about 3/4's of the cartoons there are mine anyway.)
Regarding the issue with magazines: They don't care what you do after publication, they only care that they're the first to publish it. So you have it slightly in reverse. :)
I wish you would add small FAQ about how to publish on your page. Even simple "How to submit?" "Currently we are sadly not accepting new work. You can always subscribe and we will let you know when things change" would be cool
In the meantime if you have single-panel cartoons to submit please shoot me an email (greg[at]gagcartoons[dot]com)! I'm definitely looking to expand the inventory with high-quality work.
> "This week only, HN visitors and everyone else get a 2-for-1 when you license any cartoon on GagCartoons! How to get it: Just license any cartoon, then email me and tell me which second cartoon you'd like."
good luck though!
You'd have a nice way to highlight popular cartoons, and i'd have a new source of funny/interesting content.
- can any cartoonist sign up to sell cartoons using this platform? - can you allow cartoonists to sell under more permissive licenses like CC-BY?
> can any cartoonist sign up to sell cartoons using this platform?
There's no automated system to manage this, but it's in the works. Right now a cartoonist has to email me and tell me they're interested in posting their cartoons. Then I'd batch upload their cartoons and get them all set up.
Are you interested or know someone who is?
> can you allow cartoonists to sell under more permissive licenses like CC-BY?
Hmm that's a good question. I haven't thought about allowing artists to set their license options, but now I will think about it.