I am signed on for advertising with Comicspace, but am independently hosted. Comicspace gets to advertise on my site, and they arrange advertising for me, for a percentage of the take. In exchange, they circulate A Distant Soil ads on their network.

I really don’t know what some of the other sites offer, but I do know they have site templates and cover hosting costs.

I pay all of my own expenses, but have more autonomy and can accept other’s ads if I wish. If things went sour with ComicSpace, I could easily walk with no fear of losing the ability to get advertising elsewhere, and they have absolutely no rights to my work. I know where to get ads and how to set up accounts.

But I have no quarrel with ComicSpace and appreciate the ads. They’ve been decent to me.

I would guess the set up costs and need to be a part of a community which would circulate ads to other webcomics readers would be attractive to many people starting out. I really don’t know what other people’s contracts say, but a few have been offered to me, and I was not impressed.

I did a good deal of research before deciding to go this route and narrowly missed making some very bad deals. I smelled a rat at Wowio, for example, and never signed the contract. Shortly thereafter, there was some kind of meltdown there.

I spent a lot of time studying webcomics publishing before I took the plunge. I listened to some gurus, and watched some other creators very carefully.

Several creators who made much of a muchness about going web have not done well at all, even though they signed on with comics hosting companies.

I think some of them assumed that they would put their stuff out there and they would just be so popular immediately that the money would roll in. They’d be able to get subscribers and donations, tra-la.

That’s just not the way it works. It takes a good year of regular posting to get it rolling. Remember how I originally announced I would start posting three times a week? I changed my mind right away and went to five times a week. Lots of material and steady posting is key. If I hadn’t built up a huge inventory in advance, I’d be dead already.

Having someone else cover your up-front costs and give you some advertising would obviously be attractive to some people. I simply don’t know what other carrots these companies offer.

If you are not a name creator and don’t have a way to post a lot of pages on a steady basis, and some bucks for advertising, you’re going to have a VERY hard time building an audience.

Figure anyone not ranking at the 500,000 mark on Alexa is not getting more than a few hundred readers a day. To make money on advertising, you’ve got to get those page hits. The more page views, the more you make on advertising.

If you have 500 regular readers, and the average page views per reader per day is only 2 pages, you are screwed. Some sites you might think must have thousands and thousands of readers simply don’t. One website I looked up which boasts 3500 unique readers PER DAY (this they say right there on their site,) barely has 10% that amount per day. And because they are tied into Project Wonderful (which tends to show higher unique hits counts, though page views are pretty close to the mark,) there’s only so much fibbing they can do about their numbers. They average only about 2,000 views per day, and a core audience of only 2,000 per MONTH. there is no way that site is making any money.

Just for fun, run over to some site ranking websites like Alexa and type in your faves. EDIT: yes, I know Alexa is not 100% accurate. I use several stat ranking sites and Project Wonderful numbers and cross compare several different site rankings. I have been watching trends on some of them for months.

You’d be surprised who is doing well and who isn’t.

I always said self publishing was not for everybody, and so is making a webcomic, which is just another form of self publishing. I’m no web publishing guru and am reluctant to give any advice about it.

But it’s obvious that some people who have self discipline problems are not going to be any better off web publishing themselves. And some people are underfunded, and they simply don’t have the money to go forward, either with print or web. And some people simply don’t have the free time to continue making comics that bring in no revenue. And some people simply produce work that few people want to read, even for free.

I did look up the traffic of a couple of the hosting companies that made me an offer: my site alone has 10% of the traffic of one of those sites, which must host at least 100 comics.