Last week Adam (Atom!) Freeman dropped another of his invaluable “Industry Insider” podcasts, this time interviewing the eternal, intrepid north star of comics journalists, Heidi MacDonald, on the dour topic of “The Death of Comics Journalism.” By all means, listen to the whole thing, as it’s full of valuable insights. Although I was only present in spirit and not in person, I’m going to presume to chime in with my perspective, in which I’m not just going to admire the corpse, but point a few fingers.
The rise and fall of comics journalism. Comics journalism evolved from fanzines, Usenet groups and online BBS forums to become, briefly, kind of a big deal in the mid-aughts, when outlets like MTV and Entertainment Weekly spun up their own outlets and even that most conservative bastion of business conventional wisdom, Forbes, went out and hired some guy to write about the space.
That supplemented the existing ecosystem of sources like ICv2, PW Comics World, The Comic Reporter (RIP), and of course Heidi’s own ComicsBeat, that catered specifically to fans and insiders, and therefore attracted ad dollars from the people who wanted the attention of those targeted groups. Along with a whole ecosystem of smaller sites, amplified by social media back in its quaint, short-lived “we’re gonna change the world by bringing everyone together!” era, this provided a nice bellows-blast of oxygen onto the white-hot coals of comic and comic-related IP.
Even before the pandemic, the bloom was off the rose. Most mainstream outlets started scaling back their coverage, the world moved on to video (first long form, now short), podcasts, newsletters, private Discord groups and other channels. Heidi and Adam do a great job digging in to the impact this has had on both the sites themselves and the people tasked with marketing comics on the publisher side.
It wasn’t an accident… it was murder! In some ways, the troubles with comics journalism are a microcosm of the problems with all journalism these days. Declining ad revenue have impacted publishers’ ability to produce great work and driven a lot of publications out of business. Advertisers don’t want to pay to reach smaller and smaller numbers of readers. Classic death spiral.
This didn’t just happen. It was the result of a deliberate plan by one of the biggest names in tech, our dear, trusty pal Google.
We may think of Google as a technology company, but it’s not. It’s an advertising company: just look where the revenue comes from. It first achieved success by creating a symbiotic relationship with both publishers and end users, directing people to the most relevant and authoritative content using a superior algorithm, and incentivizing creators to produce better content to get up-ranked in the search results. Then it became an invaluable partner to marketers by selling super targeted audiences, using its gigantic data sets to build predictive models of customer behavior.
But then the parasite started to attack its host. When you clicked on a Google link to go to a site, the site publisher would benefit from traffic and the associated marketing spend. Google couldn’t have that. It wanted all that ad revenue for itself, so it began finding ways to preempt and intercept information-seekers before they left the Google ecosystem. Publishers began complaining about this in the late teens as the impact really started to be felt.
Now Google has lined up the kill-shot against journalism: AI summarization. As of a few months ago, when you put in a search, Google would offer an AI summary ahead of the list of links, even from stories that appeared in publications or behind paywalls. And even if Google backs off on this (as Apple is doing following some disastrous miscues), its competitors in the AI space will probably do something similar.
Social media is piling on to the problem. Google isn’t our only false friend here. X, né Twitter, has been going through some things, as we probably know by now. But one of its less flamboyant offenses is actually one of its worst: it is deprioritizing tweets with links to external content in its algorithm, throttling the ability of promotional posts to reach a wider audience. Facebook has done something similar.
Again, they have business reasons for doing this. Neither X nor Facebook wants people leaving its ecosystem to go clicking off into the wilderness, because that hurts their own metrics and ability to generate ad revenue.
The net effect has not only killed traffic referred by those sites, and thus ad revenue to publishers and writers, it is also threatening crowdfunding because of diminished ability to reach an audience of potential supporters.
Enshitification floats downstream. This may seem obvious, but publications depend on revenue, usually from ads, sometimes from subscriptions. If you choke off or divert the revenue, the publications have less money, which means they can’t hire and pay journalists, which means their content starts to suffer, which then starts to hurt both subscriptions and any remaining ad revenue.
Getting back to comics, a lot of once-valuable sites have become content farms or worse. Clickbaity, information-free, often AI-generated stories may keep the doors open, but they don’t help the industry that needs well-informed, credible people to write real stuff, generate authentic buzz and provide some external validation to the efforts of both comics creatives and business people. Meanwhile, mainstream publications have cut down on their comics coverage as editors perceive an exhaustion with comics content in media, reflected in declining box office from Marvel and other films.
Supply and demand. Heidi and Adam suggest that the way forward is for publishers to support comics sites with advertising and partnership programs. After all, everyone benefits from a healthy system where trusted outlets exist to get the word out to fans about news and upcoming titles.
So yes! Do that! Operators are standing by to take your ad orders!
Also, readers, support your favorite sites and creators by turning off ad blockers, clicking through to advertisers, passing links along through social platforms in comments and reposts, and clicking through to the actual stories. Very importantly, sign up for email lists and newsletters, because an email list is “first party data,” owned by the publisher, and not subject to social media platforms that can throttle the reach at a whim.
On our end, we will try to keep our fickle readers from abandoning us like that cad in the famous meme, for the sexier charms of short-form video and screaming head insta-takes on social media. We’ll do the research, make the calls, tell the stories, and shine a light on as much of the great stuff coming out of this business as we can.
Because it will get awfully dark if we let the lights go out.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Rob Salkowitz (Bluesky @robsalk) is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture and a two-time Eisner Award nominee.
Source: ICv2
