Thread by @Iron_Spike

LOL god, early webcomics was rough.

- No Patreon.
- No Kickstarter.
- No Webtoons.
- No Gumroad.
- Few, if any, e-z auto-storefronts.
- Also the rest of comics openly hated/mocked you.

Replying to
@Iron_Spike
Also, this was the time when people were straight-up "Oh, I don't spend money on the internet, I don't trust it. What if Paypal runs off with my credit card number?"

Yes, really.

The one reliable way to make steady money?

Ads.

YES, REALLY.

Let me introduce you to the concept of the CASCADE.

Early 2000s internet ad revenue was... something else. Five-fig payouts! And the key to min-maxing it was

1) Getting on the best ad networks, and
2) Making sure your ad banner code (hand-coded!) was ALWAYS serving SOMETHING.

The best ad networks had high CPMs. A CPM was what the network would pay you for every 1,000 pageviews (or "impressions"). PREMIUM pay for me was $3.00, $3.50. I've heard it could go as high as $7.00.

If you comic had lots of traffic? Theoretically, hundreds of dollars daily.

Of course, practice is different than theory.

Premium ad networks only served your site a limited number of impressions, per IP and per day. When you ran out, it would (more often than not) flip over to nonprofits, whose ads they ran for free, and you got paid zilcho for.

(There's a little treat, some insider info, from you to me! All these new TV channels popping up? If they're running nonprofit promos exclusively, it's because they don't have any paying advertisers, yet.)

Now, you wanna get paid for EVERY IMPRESSION. So this is unacceptable.

So, you sign up for MULTIPLE ad networks, and code a CASCADE!

Best network? Served its ads first, MILK IT DRY. When it runs out? Kick it down to second-best, serve THOSE ads. Then third-best, fourth, etc.

End it w/Google Ads. CPM was pennies, but always served something paying.

This system was ridiculously tweakable. We filled forums with tactics and advice. I remember some folks coded those huge, square ads in, because they paid better; other folks always had a huge blog entry under every comic, full of keywords to control the sort of ads they got.

And this was really important to us! We were making comics, and people could easily read 10, 20, 50 pages in a sitting. That's a lot of potential revenue! MAXIMIZE IT.

Of course, that's when Adpocolypse struck.

Ad money had been slowly trending down for awhile by then- internet bubble, etc.- but at some point, ad networks began targeting and kicking out webcomics specifically.

In theory, it was because our pages were mostly images, which couldn't be spidered/analyzed.

That reduced the targeted accuracy of the ads they served us. Which meant the ads got less clicks, which meant the network's overall numbers went down, which meant they couldn't charge clients as much.

So, they wanted us out.

And there was a fucking PANIC.

For a lot of people, ads were their primary income stream. Imagine going from $3-4,000 a month to NOTHING.

OVERNIGHT.

I remember one story in particular: a cartoonist who had been on a great network for ages called up their Customer Support line to resolve a coding issue, and the help-desk person said "Oh... you're a comic." and NUKED HIS ACCOUNT right there.

Terrifying.

But yeah, THAT was how you made bread in webcomics, back in the day.

That, and sassy slogan t-shirts. White text on black, of course.

:V