Webcomics Changing Again

One of the things I noted in my Webcomics book was how the business model has changed over time. I referenced, in one example, how Dorothy Gambrell had to realign her webcomic business after what she called "the great t-shirt crash of 2008" when just selling t-shirts suddenly no longer paid the bills. The explosion of browser-based ad blockers in the mid-2010s forced another radical shift in how webcomics earned money. I'm now seeing the first overt evidence of another shift transpiring.

Earlier this week, Zach Weinersmith over at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal posted, instead of his usual virtually-daily comic, a bit of a screed on some sudden and visibly obvious shifts on his site. He basically notes that he has parted ways with Hiveworks, who've largely run his site and the ads and the merch store for several years. Weinersmith still owns all his material, but he's in the process of setting up new versions of all those things manually now. Which he adds is something that he hasn't done in over a decade. He said, "I feel a bit like I'm stepping into a racecar after having thought I was permanently retired from competition."

Now, while Weinersmith's message is polite and cordial about everything, the abruptness of the change without his having a backup system in place strikes me as the result of a last straw heel-turn. Some new policy or something that Hiveworks implemented without much warning that's very much not in creators' favor, and Weinersmith just said, "Enough is enough! Screw this noise!" He notes in particular the problems with the ads being displayed and how more and more of the money his site earns through them goes to social network platforms instead of himself.

The broad enshittification of everything certainly contributes to my hypothesis here as well.

But, in short, Weinsersmith is in the process of doing all the work for his site and his business by himself again. He notes that he's been doing webcomics as a career for 20 years now and it would seem that he's leaning into the business model he used at the start. Or a model relatively close to it.

Jennie Gyllblad, creator of Jenitales, had a similar set of issues towards the end of 2024 and she basically re-did her whole site herself manually and even got her own payment processing system set up. Her particular concerns were more along the lines of her "adult" comics -- and more to the point, who/how any given platform defines "adult" and when they decide that their definition retroactively changes. It's clear in some of the videos she's posted where she explains what she's done and why that it was not an easy transition. Which makes sense. After all, she's an artist and wants to tell stories. She's not a marketer or accountant or website developer.

But I suspect we're going to see a lot of this type of thing throughout 2025. Either from creators getting fed up with increasingly awful terms of service, or because of asinine political policies seemingly designed to tank the economy and run some providers out of business. Hopefully, other creators will have the agility and/or general savviness to avoid the worst problems, but it wouldn't surprise me to see other webcomics running into some unintended hiatuses while they sort out how to continue to make a living. As Weinersmith said, there has been "more than one tough passage" when it comes to being a webcomic creator over the past couple decades. He and many others did survive those. But others did not.

Best of luck to Weinersmith, Gyllblad, and everyone else who is dealing/will soon deal with all this.

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