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Or when the books are released make the comics that are not in book form available online for free and paywall them once a book has been published (in order to drive sales to the books). He could make the first couple years and the previous two years free of charge but charge money for the archives. I don't know what his readership it like these days, but if he could get 24,745 people to pay that (just to use a random number) that would be $296,940 a year! That is NOT bad and would certainly keep the comic viable (not to mention the bonus money that would come from those paintings he's auctioning off)!Īnd there's so many ways to do this. Especially if prices can remain reasonable! Personally, I'm fine with paying $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year (little discount there) to read "PvP" either online or in my mailbox! If he really wants to be competitive, he can even charge $1 a month or $12 a year. I've been reading it since I was a teenager! Despite the merchandise sales and random books I may have purchased, I've essentially been given free entertainment going on two decades at this point, and paying for something I've clearly enjoyed this long is a pretty logical thing to do at this point (heck, to not pay for it makes me feel like I'm stealing to a certain extent).
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Heck, it's not just not a bad idea, it's a GREAT idea! "PvP" has been around for more than twenty years at this point. What would happen if after 23 years, new PvP went behind a paywall?- Scott Kurtz August 21, 2021Īnd you know what.this isn't a bad idea. Thought experiment: Apple and Google (and bad practices) killed online advertising. Covid-19 has made many of these sources dry up even more, and it prompted Scott to ask this very realistic question on Twitter:
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As a comic that has been given away 'for free' since its inception, "PvP" has always relied on convention appearances, book sales, and ad revenue. However, like ad revenue dried up for magazines and shifted online so too has online ad revenue dried up and gone to video streaming sites. While we may have taken the leap into self-publishing as either a vanity project or just to get our stuff out there, most of us remember when we discovered Google Adsense and what the term "monetization" actually meant (though, for the record, I'm sure Scott was using advertising models before Adsense came along).
![scott kurtz voice change scott kurtz voice change](https://getelements.com/wp-content/uploads/S2E28_1693.png)
At the end of the day though we who do things on the internet tend to rely mostly on advertising. In the past deals with Image Comics and sales of Skull plushies helped fund the series. At the moment he is doing random paintings of characters and auctioning them on eBay starting at a penny (which has almost always turned into a LOT of pennies by the time the auction is over). The constant money challenges the fictional PvP: The Magazine faces every few years is likely written from experience by author Scott Kurtz, who is always open when the media landscape changes to the point where he needs to rethink how his art is supposed to make him money. In their minds why throw money away on plastic that can be streamed over the internet "for free?" Heck, I look at my BluRay collection with pride and joy while my nieces look at it - on multiple shelves throughout the house - and see nothing but junk that takes up space. The issue isn't that any of these companies were doing anything particularly wrong per se, only that the way video game journalism is consumed is so drastically different these days, That's time, it happens, and what one generation does doesn't nessicarily work for the next generation. Then my reading of those websites cratered when YouTube came along and I could "watch" my video game news and reviews, and to a certain extent IGN and Gamespot now paywall various video features and interactive sections on their websites. Today all but Game Informer is gone, and I remember I started reading less of them when IGN and Gamespot were giving me the same types of reviews and news articles at a much faster pace. I read Game Pro, Nintendo Power, Electronic Gaming Monthly, The Official Dreamcast Magazine, and Game Informer. I actually grew up reading gaming magazines. Actually, now that I think about it, there were TWO storylines in which the staff of PvP were in danger of the company shuttering and the characters losing their jobs! Readers could maybe joke that Cole Richards just wasn't a good manager (and there were times he certainly wasn't), however the fluctuating fate of PvP: The Magazine had less to do with Cole's management style and more to do with an ever changing media landscape. The image above comes from a particularly memorable storyline from Scott Kurtz's "PvP" in which the future of PvP: The Magazine is in danger of running out of money.