After some amount of soul-searching (or something similar), I’ve decided to drop the adspace from the comic, at least for now. My reason is that it really wasn’t earning its keep, and I felt that there was no reason to sell out before I could even stand to benefit by doing so. (I’d estimate that on average I was earning less than a cent a day.) I don’t really like the idea of ads, and if I’m not even benefiting from them, I don’t see the point in having them. Furthermore, I was conscious of a constant feeling that the drive to Make the Ads Profitable was potentially compromising the reason I started the comic in the first place, which was that I wanted to.
All that being said, I realize that some of you probably liked the ads and will be sorry that they’re gone. I know that buying ad space is one way that I pledge support to a comic, and I suspect that it’s the same for many of you. If you were buying ad space because you liked the comic, my thanks go out to you. If you were buying ad space here because it was bloody cheap and looked like a way to get a couple more pageviews, well, you’re one of the reasons it no longer exists.
If you really liked the comic, though, there are other ways of showing your support. Most obviously, you could link to it from your own site (kind of the opposite of advertising, I admit). When the issue ends, a print edition will be debuting. I haven’t really considered a tip box, but if you guys would be interested in such a thing I’d oblige. And if all you really want is to say you like it, I’d love a quick email (and you can rest assured it would end up in the ego-feed.txt file I keep for myself).
And in conclusion, there was one thing that I will genuinely miss about the ad boxes. I clicked a few of them myself, and some of the sites I found that way are still in my bookmarks. Project Wonderful has created a sort of community within webcomics, and I’ll admit I’m kind of sorry to have pulled out of it. With this in mind, I’m going to try to come up with another method to implement the same link-sharing abilities that the ads allowed without compromising my sense of ethics. So, above all, stay tuned! Exciting things to come.
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