Following yesterday’s news from Dirk at Journalista that the contents of The Comics Journal’s 300th issues (and the final one in its present form as it moves to a larger bi-annual publication) would be free online, with more content to follow on the web, I notice this morning that Oli East has left a comment on yesterday’s post noting that it’s not up there anymore. A quick visit to Journalista confirms that clicking on the free content announced yesterday yields only a message that this area if for subscribers only and Dirk has updated the post on Journalista to say that this freshly announced experiment in offering online content to encourage reading of the print versions has been pretty much stillborn, cancelled and withdrawn already. Which is a great pity; as I said yesterday a number of artists in various mediums from comics and prose books to music have found offering free versions of their work online has lead to an increase in interest in the work they actually sell to make a living. It also seems a bit confusing to make that sort of announcement of a new online initiative only to cancel it a few hours later for whatever reasons the TCJ crew had (one would have thought if they had reasons for not doing it then why make such an announcement only to withdraw it within hours?). Shame.
November 17th, 2009 at 10:56 am
They probably learnt a lot from this experiment: “if we gave it away free, we’d have X amount of readers for every issue on its day of release, when we charge we have only Y; we can see clearly which features got the most hits, quickest”. So it could well have been one big fishing trip by their online editors.
All I learnt is that their sub-editors can’t tell the difference between Dave Gibbons, Kev O’Neill and Steve Dillon.