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[jaydub]

The way he's been pimping out the fan-flow on the achewood.com main page I tend to think he's got a fair bit going on behind the curtain.

I have no idea what a fan-flow is.  It apparently happens more than monthly.

[littlefallsmets]

There have been times where I considered buying merchandise but thought the better of it because the dude charges for the fan-flow stuff.

Like "dude doesn't need MY support when he's monetizing his scraps instead of actually, you know, creating the actual strip".

It isn't entirely sane but this line of thinking has made me reconsider buying merch a few times.

[wombat]

I would so much like to not get into a discussion again about why These Kids Today think that there is something wrong with a person charging money for creative work, and how this attitude is so much more surprising coming from certain people, who I assume are not going to give that novel away, if they ever finish it.

“artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art.
artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye.
artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks.
please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money.”
—    Amanda F Palmer from her essay Why I Am Not Afraid To Take Your Money

[littlefallsmets]

Oh, I'm not saying that the feeling's fair, I'm just admitting that it's there.

The changing of the social contract from "you're supporting this strip by buying merch and collections" to "you're supporting this strip by paying for ancillary material that quickly became the main output" is what irks me, though, not the idea of the guy making money off his work. I'd like to do the same someday, of course.

It's the rules changing again and again.

[Arachno-capitalist]

Wombat, this is the interweb. I pay my entry fee and I expect everything else to magically find a way to pay for itself with ads and convincing investors that one day they'll find a way to make money (twitter).
jk.

[wombat]

I thought the way the internet worked was that everything supported itself by selling t-shirts. Come to think of it, why doesn't Twitter sell t-shirts?

LFM, just curious, how many t-shirts and collections did you buy before Assetbar?

[Arachno-capitalist]

I thought the way the internet worked was that everything supported itself by selling t-shirts. Come to think of it, why doesn't Twitter sell t-shirts?

If Twitter sold t-shirts they'd actually have a revenue line on their income statement. But, according to them, that would be distracting and harmful to the dream they are chasing.
"How do you make money from Twitter?

Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world. While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make."

[wombat]

"Wombat Inc. has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand."

Yeah, I could get used to that.

[alreadyinuse]

There can be reasons why a startup like Twitter shouldn't turn on the revenue right away.  There are posts about this on http://www.techcrunch.com

Wombat:  Yes, there used to be (still are?) two versions of assetbar.  One is free, the other is pay-only.  You can still get to the free one, even though it's broken... go to achewood.com, and click on "discuss."  it shows you a blank page.  it used to show you the free assetbar.

It is a mistake to say that the free assetbar was not bringing in revenue for Onstad.  Every bit of content that you put out there for free is fodder for public discussion about you.  The idea is to have your content floating out there in whatever system people use (google, youtube, the school bus on the way to school, etc.)  That way, people who have never heard of you may be exposed to you when other people talk about your content.  It's also a good idea to have plenty of free content on your site, so that people form the habit of hanging around your site.  The longer someone hangs around your site, the more likely they are to form a connection to your work, and to buy something.  Even if the free content on your site isn't directly about your work very much, as the free assetbar wasn't very much about Onstad's work, it still served the purpose of giving people some reason to hang out and so absolutely yes, it had to bring in some revenue from people who otherwise would have read the achewood strip and then gone away and forgotten about it.

Of course, I can see assetbar being a liability because anyone can post anything on it and it's poorly regulated.  While that is part of the charm of assetbar, it is also a liability...  but anyway, assetbar is content, and it was free.  (at least the free version was free.)  So in providing free content, the free assetbar was an asset.

The trick is to determine how much content you float out there for free, and how much you want to charge for.  

Obviously, if an artist decides to force the take down of every possible copy of their work everywhere, then that artist has no exposure anywhere and may slip into oblivion.  If on the other hand the artist allows high-quality copies of her work to be reproduced everywhere, then few people may pay for authorized/licensed copies.

I logged in and tried the pay-assetbar after the free assetbar went down a few days ago, and I wasn't happy with the interface of the pay-assetbar.  You got to look at the stuff that Onstad posts, but if you wanted to use it as a discussion forum, the interface was actually more kludgy and difficult to use than the free assetbar.  If you compare the discussions in the free assetbar to the pay assetbar, the discussions in the free assetbar are much more extensive.  I think that is probably due to the interface on the free assetbar being easier to use and being more responsive.. it's less clicking and scrolling on the free assetbar to have a discussion than on the pay assetbar.  

Some people might prefer the pay assetbar, but I think that the possibilities of the interface are absolutely different between the free and the pay versions, and that will impact what kind of content is generated, and how valuable it is for the site.

[littlefallsmets]

Maybe $50 worth of gifts for friends who are into Achewood. Also, got the GOF book at a signing.

I dunno what to say, here, I don't think it's wrong to be bugged by the transition from:

"Here is this thing, buy stuff to support it" to "Here is less and less of this thing, buy stuff to support it AND pay every month to see the deleted scenes" and now, apparently, "Here is less and less of this thing, buy stuff to support it AND pay every month to see the deleted scenes or maybe also post in the official forums".

I understand that the guy's gotta make a living and, intellectually, I am all for people figuring out how to make a living off of commerical art.

But the arc of how it has gone down oogs me out. Feels needlessly mercenary and shortsighted in terms of how one actually maintains a fanbase.

Doesn't charging more and more for less and less eventually choke off the entire economic model as opposed to growing your audience more and more the old way and as your fanbase grows and grows, you gradually sell more and more merchandise?

[linnea]

I subscribe to paid AssBar, and I have for a long time, I almost never post there, and here's why. The monthly price is less than a magazine and it's a way for me to support Achewood. I think the $3 is worth it to read a few extra strips per month. I cringe when Onstad busts out the kneepads for his core demographic (i.e., current Todd story arc), but other than that I mostly enjoy the guy's work and will pay to support it. I know most of the folks here and I prefer to read what y'all have to say about the strip.

[wombat]

Well, I didn't know before this that the NYTimes had a bestsellers list for "graphic books," but the current Achewood is number 3 on it, so I'm guessing his fanbase is doing OK.

Wait, so there were totally different discussions going on on the free Assetbar? There were two unconnected official discussion forums? I missed that entirely.

[dejavroom]

I understand that the guy's gotta make a living and, intellectually, I am all for people figuring out how to make a living off of commerical art.

I find this an... interesting distinction to make, considering that someone at some point has to pay for the art, as for everything else. Printing a book costs bucks, and so does running a website... What do you contrast to "commercial art"?

[littlefallsmets]

Well, a lot of people do webcomics as a hobby or as a supplemental income at best. I'd say that for the vast majority of people, it's a labour of love where the minor tee-shirt sales or ads or whatever MIGHT cover the webhosting costs, some art supplies and an extra couple of dinners-out a month and that's it. If that. Probably, actually, the vast majority of people recoup little of their sunk costs at all.

I get the feeling that maybe the weird off-putting cash-grab of the fanflow might be a sign that the dude made Achewood his sole source of income too soon and that the slow bleeding-out of the golden goose's neck are evident in things like the petering out of actual new content and the reshuffling of the ass-bar and so on and so forth.

And especially if the dude is starting to make good money off the mass-published collections of the strips, doesn't it behoove him to advertise those books and keep generating new full material to be put into future books, as opposed to being distracted by putting incomplete extra material into the fanflow just to maintain the conceit of the subscribers-only section?

Like the dude got in over his head and threw together the idea of charging people for the dribs and drabs without any sort of plan, not realizing how much it would restrict him from keeping the main site... and the main content of his work... going?

I don't know. If the books are selling so much that he's going to get people to pay money for scraps, it almost feels more intellectually and creatively honest to just make the whole endeavour a pay site. If they aren't, it seems to make more sense to concentrate on the real material to keep driving new fans to the books and posters and making your money there.

Splitting one's attention into two and trying to skim money off the top of one of the two damaged streams of thought... it seems counterintuitive, creatively and economically.

To be honest, if he went all-pay, I'd probably reluctantly subscribe, just because I like his stuff.

But making the main stuff sporadic and uninspired so as to churn out more even-lesser material behind a pay-wall, man, it seems like the worst of both worlds.

[Doc]

Wombat get's a can for citing the wisdom of Amanda Palmer.

I haven't done anything to support Onstad ever. I am a dead fuck*ng weight around his website's broadband. Though you might be able to argue that my main motivation for keeping up with Achewood these days is talking to you guys.