Corporate Webcomics?

When comics, as we conventionally think of them, first debuted in newspapers, they were designed as a way to sell more papers. You could read about the news of the day, catch up on the local gossip, and chuckle at the antics of Mickey Dugan. It was all part of the package that is/was newspapers. You didn’t buy the paper specifically for the latest Blondie any more than you bought it for article about local zoning laws on page B-7, but you bought the paper for the collection of everything that was in it.

Now, with the inherent link-ability of web pages, there’s less of a need to focus on a single source for information. You might read one article on CNN.com, another on FoxNews.com, and a third on AlJazeera.com before heading over to ESPN.com for sports scores. (OK, yeah, I know that realistically, no one who reads Fox is going to also read Al Jazeera and vice versa, but you get my point.) Sites are largely ad-supported, so you as a reader don’t need to pay for reading any of the articles, unlike newspapers which are only partially ad-supported and still require the reader to pay for the privledge of reading it. So it’s not only cheaper but more effective to hop around to different sites in order to find the articles that cover the topics you’re most interested in.

Because of that, articles have changed how they’re being written. There’s a greater emphasis on generating intriguing headline copy, and skewing the language of the articles to be more conducive to search engine algorithms. Publishers still want to attract as many views as possible, and they’ve largely been doing that via sensationalism. That’s essentially what some sites use as their entire structure.

So my question is: why couldn’t a webcomic be incoporated into a site like that? Not just the syndication of some comic someone is already producing, but an original hosted webcomic that also speaks to the same world-view held by the site already.

Bandai Namco Games did try reviving interest in many of their long-dormant video game properties several years ago by hosting a number of commissioned webcomics loosely based on those properties. That lasted about two years; it’s unclear why those were canceled though. Emerald City Comicon used to aoriginal webcomics to draw people to their site in between convention updates.

But I wonder why more sites don’t try this? They’re (usually) paying the people who write their articles, after all; wouldn’t a visually interesting content component like a webcomic also be worth paying for? Wouldn't a decent comic have the potential to be shared around like any other image and carry with it the URL of the hosting domain, i.e. the website of the news organization in the first place? It couldn't work like comic strips for newspapers whose locality meant that several papers could run the same comics, but surely the costs of getting syndication rights for a dozen or two comics is comparable to paying one decent webcartoonist, no?

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