SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

I know of an artist who left Hiveworks years ago for various reasons, among them being controlling about what artists could/couldn't say on social media and trying to choke out the competition in arguably shady ways.

There are rumors suggesting financial and legal issues: https://www.tumblr.com/shinesurge/777346311384072192?source=...

Other comics that have left hiveworks that I know of: Daughter of the Lilies (weird christian fantasy, currently on hiatus) In Blood We Rise (idk, I don't read it, looks like gay vampires)

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.

I thought the same thing and I doubt we're talking about the same comics. The one I noticed dropping hiveworks ads was "The Devil's Panties" (not actually porn, just wholesome slice of life).

fwiw, you likely can't make real money with this.

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.

The attention economy is powered by payments from maximizing ad impressions but the public is increasingly recognizing that the attention economy is mentally and culturally toxic. To break free of the attention economy death spiral that we're in, internet advertising has to undergo a pretty drastic dieback. In other words, the whole thing has to fall apart and the sooner the better.

I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads. Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now?

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"?

I might be unusual, but I’d be quite happy to pay more than my ad value (less than a cent per pageview in most cases) to sites, but there’s no system to do so.

There’s zero chance I’m going to subscribe to every site that I might hit a few times a year.

I've heard legends of a time, perhaps back in the mid 2000s, when companies paid so much for banner ads that you didn't need another revenue source for your website with Flash games or what have you. If such a time ever existed, it ended long before Flash did.

> 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?

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 answer to no more ads is you can't be independent. You have to have service aggregation.

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.

I'm not entirely sure it would be worse than the status quo. If all the free sites were the ones run for the love of it, and all the paid sites were commercial garbage, that might actually be better.

Everyone just assumes that the only way to do ads online are from these giant, shitty ad platforms like Facebook or Google. When really, you can have smaller ad networks that provide curated and content tailored advertising. It's just a lot more labor intensive and it doesn't scale to nation-state levels of money like Google Ads does.

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.