Internet adventures

Some Quick Thoughts on the Future of Webcomics

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Last week John Allison of Scary Go Round and more recently Bad Machinery fame wrote a blog post expressing his fear that, as more and more webcartoonists took to social networking sites like Tumblr, it would be harder for them to make money off their work because even if their work went viral, it would get lost in the shuffle of people’s Tumblr feeds and no one would make the connection to them as the creator of that work. As a result, he fears the decline of the sort of “community” that has so characterized webcomics up to this point.

Personally, I think his fears are overblown; for one thing, I find it hard to compare Tumblr cartoonists with other webcartoonists, in part because most blogging platforms that aren’t modified WordPress make poor places to put up webcomics anyway, mostly due to archive management. As such, I suspect most Tumblr cartoonists aren’t very interested in fame and fortune anyway, and are more of the David Morgan-Mar frame of mind, of just wanting to share their creations with the world. In any case, the question is, would, say, Kate Beaton still have attracted a large following if she’d started out on Tumblr instead of LiveJournal? (After all, the former is essentially an evolved version of the latter.) Since most webcomics got their start through word of mouth, I find it hard to believe that the boom in social networking is anything but good for them (though whether it’s good for the quality of content that becomes popular is another matter, if it means the most popular comics essentially become nothing but meme factories).

But Allison’s broader fear is the notion that, for many, “social media ARE the Internet”, making it harder for web sites like his to catch anyone’s notice. I think this too is overblown, but mostly because of a far larger force reshaping the Internet that’s both largely responsible for that notion and that could end up sweeping both visions of the Internet under its feet, one that does pose a tremendous challenge, but ultimately a tremendous opportunity, for webcomics. I’ll have more on that next week.

So, what’s this newfangled “webcomics” thing, anyway?

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DISCLAIMER: The linking of a webcomic in this post should not be taken to mean these are the only good webcomics out there, or even that I necessarily endorse them. They are primarily intended as demonstrations where they appear.

“Wet tonic”? What’s that?

A webcomic is, basically, a comic that appears on the web. It’s pretty much as simple as that.

Okay, so what kind of comic are we talking about? There’s a lot of different kinds out there. Are we talking newspaper comic strips, comic books like with the X-Men in them, stand-up comedians, or something else?

All of the above and then some. (Well, maybe not the stand-up comedian part, although that kind of “webcomic” could exist too.) Many of your favorite newspaper comic strips are available online, and have been for well over a decade, complete with archives of at least a month, at sites like GoComics.com. And both Marvel and DC comics have made a substantial portion of their libraries available online as well. The beauty of the web is, because it’s not tied to the size of a printed page, a comic can be any size you want – but we’ll get to that later.

So, those newspaper comic strips and comic books that I can read online, those are webcomics?

I guess technically they are. This is where we get into the thorny area of our definition of webcomics. For the most part, calling something a “webcomic” typically means it appeared on the web first, before appearing in some other form. For example, there was a series of steampunk graphic novels called Girl Genius whose creators decided to start publishing its pages on the Web for eventual collection into print form. Once they did that, it became a webcomic.

On the other hand, that still means you could conceivably call most newspaper comic strips webcomics, not to mention a handful of comic books that show up online on the same day they’re published. So I guess it’s not good enough to be simultaneous; they have to appear on the web before they ever appear in print. If they ever appear in print.

Okay, but I still don’t have a good have a good idea of what a webcomic is. What does a webcomic look like?

Well, again, there’s really no constraints as to what a webcomic might look like, so webcomics come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, though most try to look like newspaper comic strips to some extent, and most of the rest look like comic book pages. PVP is about the goings-on in the offices of a gaming magazine, and essentially looks like it would fit right in in your local newspaper. Penny Arcade, a commentary on video games so wildly popular it’s become a franchise spawning its own gaming conventions, uses substantially taller panels. Ctrl+Alt+Del, a comic about a group of gamers and the subject of a very vocal section of the Internet that hates its guts, arranges its panels in a 2×2 grid. Questionable Content, which can probably be best described as a snarkier Friends, uses four panels stacked one on top of the other. And plenty of other webcomics don’t use a consistent style at all, especially the more memetic or editorial-cartoony ones like the even more wildly popular xkcd. Most webcomics in the comic-book tradition, like the aforementioned Girl Genius, post a single page each time they update, though the lack of constraints the format provides means that some, like The Order of the Stick, can be more flexible with the format when circumstances warrant. And then there are comics with even weirder formats.

Scott McCloud, a comic writer and artist who revolutionized the way people saw the medium in the early 90s when he created Understanding Comics, wrote a sequel, Reinventing Comics, in 2000 where, among other things, he suggested that the freedom the Internet and computers in general provide from the constraints of the page could allow comics artists to sprawl out indefinitely, allowing comics to take whatever shape might seem natural, even in three dimensions, an idea he somewhat inadvertently gave the name of the “infinite canvas”. So far such ideas have mostly been limited to gimmicky works where the idea is part of the point, with limited application in other works, partly because it’s harder to make money when your work isn’t serialized, and there’s a lot less reason to use the infinite canvas when it is serialized, leaving the infinite canvas to those who have free time and are more concerned about “purity” than anything else. Nonetheless, there are certainly a goodly number of interesting applications out there if you know where to look, and perhaps smartphones and tablets may make it more viable. For more traditional comic-book-style webcomics, McCloud suggested a half-page format that could fit within a monitor window to minimize scrolling.

I notice that a lot of these webcomics have to do with video games and other nerdy pursuits. Are there any webcomics a normal person might be interested in?

Yeah, that’s the thing about the Internet and technology in general: the first people to flock to something new will generally be geeks, nerds, geeknerds, and nerdgeeks. Unless it’s porn. But then, is there really a difference?

But yeah, nerds definitely seem to be over-represented in webcomics, even the ones that aren’t so obviously nerdy (Randall Munroe has a degree in physics and xkcd used to be infamous for its esoteric math jokes). Heck, many of the less nerdy gag-a-day strips have ended, though Kevin and Kell, a comic about a society of anthropomorphic animals made by a newspaper-comic veteran, is still going strong. Beyond that, a lot of the rest tend not to be for the faint of heart, whether it’s a comic about a sex freak (Least I Could Do) or a comic that just goes for as much shock value per comic as it can (Cyanide and Happiness).

I’d like to read a good story. What are some good comic-book-style webcomics out there?

There are three “long-form” webcomics in particular that tend to get praise heaped upon them for their stories, two of which we’ve already mentioned. Girl Genius, in addition to becoming a milestone for migrating from print comics to the web, tends to rack up a ton of awards; its steampunk – er, “gaslamp fantasy” – setting is utterly overrun by mad scientists. The Order of the Stick started out as a simple stick-figure comic riffing on what the Dungeons and Dragons rules must look like within the game world- and achieved enough popularity that way to start looking like the Penny Arcade of D&D – but eventually expanded that out into a truly epic fantasy story that I would be willing to put among the greats of the genre. Gunnerkrigg Court may look superficially like Harry Potter with a female protagonist, but it has its own themes and direction that give it a more mythological feel. All three are available in print, though I doubt you’ll find them at your local bookstore.

There are plenty of other good stories to be found among the world of webcomics as well; one of the deans of webcomics is Sluggy Freelance, which started out as a wacky anything-goes style comic, and never really stopped being such, but managed to turn its anything-goes nature into a huge sprawling plotline that now spans close to a decade and a half of material. Schlock Mercenary has been churning out its own brand of space opera every single day for over a decade now. And special mention should go to Homestuck, about a group of kids who begin playing a knockoff of The Sims – with a twist that leads them down a road beyond imagination, which has become a phenomenon that must be seen to be believed, and whose unique format defies description even as a webcomic.

Wait, all of those are incredibly nerdy too! Are there any story comics that aren’t sci-fi or fantasy?

Yeah, same problem as with the gag-a-day comics. Here’s the thing: a lot of the older, more successful webcomic creators tend to all know each other, as well as a number of more prominent webcomic bloggers, and they often tend to circlejerk around to work with each other and promote each other’s work, and since they tend to all be nerds, when they’re not promoting each other’s work they’re typically promoting stuff that’s equally nerdy. As a result, there’s a certain ecosystem of webcomics out there that tend to be more prominent than the others (which doesn’t necessarily correlate with popularity) and which tend to determine which comics occupy the next tier of prominence, and it’s very difficult for a non-nerdy webcomic to break into that logjam, especially when you consider that webcomics, as a whole, are still in many ways sort of a niche.

The closest things there are to a non-nerdy story-based webcomic – or really, the most prominent non-nerdy comics at all – are really more akin to soap-operatic newspaper strips that follow the ongoing trials and tribulations of a group of friends and the relationships between them, like Something Positive, Girls with Slingshots, and the aforementioned Questionable Content. But even those comics tend to have wacky elements that can border on the fantastic, to the point that QC has actually been described as sci-fi (though the other two aren’t really any weirder than, say, Dilbert). Then there’s Red String and Megatokyo, two manga-styled romance comics. But for the most part, it’s slim pickings if you’re not a nerd and want to add a true webcomic to your daily routine, though there are more than a few out there if you know where to look.

Aren’t all webcomics piles of utter bullcrap, often bordering on porn, created by egotistical d-bags with no one to stop them from publishing their monstrosities for the world to see?

It’s true that there are more than a few egotistical webcomics creators out there that rub people the wrong way, most prominently Scott Kurtz and Tim Buckley of PVP and Ctrl+Alt+Del respectively, but most webcomics creators seem to be genuinely interested in their fans, the world at large, and the development of the medium. The formation of a “webcomics community” may have formed a circlejerk that keeps the attention focused on certain kinds of work, but it’s also a mutually supportive place that seeks to elevate the standing and success of all involved, and it’s possible to become popular without it anyway, the same way anything else on the Internet becomes popular.

And while there are relatively few barriers to entry in webcomics, just as on the Internet as a whole, creating a webcomic is a bit more technically complex than creating something more textually oriented – the Internet is really more optimized for text than images, so the popularity of webcomics vis-a-vis more text-based fiction (webnovels?) is somewhat surprising if not mystifying. At the very least, you need someone with artistic skills, a useful art-making program like Adobe Illustrator (possibly along with expensive add-ons like a drawing tablet) or a good scanner, and the ability to upload images to a web site and stitch them together with hyperlinks in a coherent way. Between that and the general difficulty of making it in the crowded marketplace of the Internet, in my experience a webcomic generally needs to be pretty good in order to achieve the level of popularity necessary for success, so the cream does rise to the top. There are certainly plenty of crappy and porny webcomics, but also a number of truly worthy works, some of which I’ve named above, and which aren’t even that hard to find.

But if they were really that good, wouldn’t they have been published by a real comic publisher or syndicate?

Well, for one thing, a publisher or syndicate is a middleman who takes a cut of whatever money you make and often tries to exert control over your work, which has good and bad aspects. Perhaps that’s a tradeoff you’re willing to make when you compare it to the uncertainty that you’ll make one red cent off your comic online. But neither publishers nor syndicates are really all that good at it anymore; newspapers are dying, and while you can make some guaranteed money getting your strip syndicated, if your comic is really worthy you can get a larger, more devoted, and younger fanbase online. As for comic books, that market hasn’t been that big to begin with since at least the mid-90s, especially outside the big two superhero publishers, so if nothing else publishing your story online to start with can be a massive advertisement for potential readers, growing your potential fanbase exponentially, as the creators of Girl Genius can attest. So the creators of the best work might actually be better off on the web, regardless of their desire to make money. In other words? Webcomics are the future. Resistance is futile.

Okay, I’m interested. Where do I go if I want to learn more or discover more webcomics?

You can check out some of the webcomics I’ve reviewed, including some listed here, though keep in mind that I tend to be focused on my own enjoyment of a comic more than anything else and my tastes may not be the same as yours. At the least, be sure to read the full review and take my comments (especially some of my older reviews) with a grain of salt. There are some other webcomics critics out there, but you can probably count them on one hand; the dean of webcomics criticism is Eric Burns-White of Websnark, but these days he tends to post very rarely if at all, and even in his heyday he didn’t really “review” comics so much as comment on the ones he personally regularly read. Still, you can trawl through some of his older posts for some interesting insights. Really, the only other active, worthy webcomics critics I’m really aware of (aside from some occasional ventures on broader comics-focused sites) are Tangents and The Webcomic Overlook, both of which do engage in actual reviews of webcomics, though Tangents, like Websnark and myself, tends more often than not to go off on comics he’s already reading.

There are a number of other sites that aim to help you find webcomics you might enjoy, such as The Webcomic List, Ink Outbreak or Just the First Frame. TopWebComics is the last bastion of what used to be a fairly big thing in webcomics, the ongoing popularity contest; while the big comics don’t need the publicity and so don’t partake in it, it’s still a good way to find some up-and-coming webcomics with a devoted enough fanbase.

I’m considering creating a webcomic. What should I do?

First, if you’re considering creating a webcomic for the fame or fortune, you’re in it for the wrong reasons. It is still incredibly difficult to make money on the Internet, with advertising rarely being a sufficient money stream by itself, and only a fraction of a fraction of webcomics are actually successful; by most counts, you’ll need a readership in the thousands before you can expect to see more than a trickle of money. The number of webcomics to make any sort of impact anywhere remotely resembling broader culture can probably be counted on one hand (namely, xkcd and Penny Arcade). Most webcomics attempt to make money through selling T-shirts, which generally means finding something memetic that people will lap up, with the comic itself struggling to become more than a thinly-disguised T-shirt advertisement. Selling print collections of the online comics is another popular monetary stream, though the availability of the comic free online kind of undercuts it. Still, it seems to be the main money stream for long-form, story-based comics, though it undercuts the whole idea of the infinite canvas. Since McCloud, the messianic promise of “micropayments” has hovered over webcomics and the Internet as a whole, and probably always will.

Second, the easiest way to set up a webcomic site is through something set up for the purpose. Webcomic hosts like Comic Genesis, the Duck and Webcomics Nation can give you everything you need to get going quickly, though they may not be the best choice for aspiring professionals, especially since they tend to attract works of mixed quality. Generally, the best comics on those sites leave when they really start going. Another approach is to use pre-boxed tools to build your own site; there are several plugins you can install on a WordPress site (like this one) to optimize it for webcomic publishing, ComicPress (and its sister Comic Easel) probably being the most well-known, though stripShow and Webcomic are options as well. Not having experience with any of these, I can’t tell you which is best. If you have programming knowledge or know a programmer, you could code your own site by hand, but that could very easily run into problems; I took a crash course in PHP and coded a fairly simple webcomic script when I dipped my own toe into webcomics for about a year and a half, but it doesn’t seem to work with modern versions of PHP and I can’t seem to get it to work.

Third, keep in mind that the setting of the web allows you to do a lot of things that aren’t really feasible in print, and not just making your comic any size you want. You can flesh out your comic beyond the comic itself with all sorts of metatextual information, such as cast descriptions and other aids to new readers, or hide exposition about the world or characters of your comic on separate pages so they don’t get in the way of the comic itself, or leave little notes alongside each installment of your comic that might include reminders of past events, comments on the action, or just whatever’s on your mind. It can help to see your webcomic as an entire web site of which the comic is only a part.

Finally, try to suck up as much knowledge as you can about how to do this; I can’t tell you everything you need to know, not least of the reasons why being I don’t have much experience at it myself. How to Make Webcomics, by four successful webcomic creators, is often considered the Bible for making a successful and profitable webcomic, though it definitely reflects the authors’ agendas and points of view, so take it with a grain of salt. There’s plenty of other advice out there on the web, including by webcomic creators themselves, reflecting that community I was talking about earlier. You might also want to check out McCloud’s books Understanding Comics and Making Comics, especially the online chapter of the latter all about webcomics.

Anything else?

Nothing leaps to mind. You might want to leave a comment on this page if you have any other questions, though. With the way webcomics continue to evolve, I’m sure most of this post will be obsolete within five years.

Is Google the cable company of the future?

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Amidst a television landscape of authenticated streaming, pointless restrictions on online viewing, inflated sports rights fees, a-la-carte debates, cord-cutting debates, five-dollar ESPNs, and contentious carriage disputes, a technology giant that originally made its money on the technology responsible for all of this is about to give a bunch of ordinary people in America’s heartland a taste of the future.

Google is about to launch its new Google Fiber project in the Kansas City area, and it provides a glimpse into how what we now know as a cable provider might look in the future. At first glance, it’s offering a standard TV/Internet bundle, but Google seems to see it as substantially more than how you might be seeing it, that it’s not clear where the TV ends and the Internet begins, if it does at all. In addition to an HD-ready “TV box” and network connectivity, Google is also offering a “storage box” with two terabytes of DVR storage (including the ability to record eight shows at once) and other functionality, as well as a free Nexus 7 tablet (advertised as “your new remote” while also touting the ability to share your TV viewing with friends), a free 1TB Google Drive account, and the chance to buy a Chromebook on top of everything else. (I’m guessing either the TV or storage boxes will come with Google TV as well; Google is promoting Netflix integration with the service. It’s also possible to just get the network box and Google Drive account without the TV hookup or anything else.) According to Google, its gigabit Internet speeds are 100 times the norm in the industry – enough, it believes, to completely revolutionize the Internet experience – and it claims to be able to deliver HD with zero compression.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the rollout of Google Fiber, though, has to do with the process of getting it. Part of the reason why cable companies tend to have effective monopolies – and why the “last mile” problem in installing fiber-optic networks has been so intractable – has to do with the nature of the technology and the expense of laying down wires across a large urban or suburban area. Google, by contrast, decided to save money by only building its network in areas that wanted it enough to justify the expense. So it divided the two Kansas Cities up into 202 “fiberhoods” and gave each one a threshold for pre-registrations it had to meet for anyone to get Fiber installed. To sweeten the pot for anyone who would normally be uninterested, Google has even offered Internet service at typical broadband speeds for a one-time $300 construction fee (payable in $25 installments for the first year), and completely free thereafter. Google is also providing full service to community buildings in each fiberhood for free as well. As a result, 180 of the 202 fiberhoods met their respective thresholds before Sunday’s deadline, nearly 90 percent of all the fiberhoods Google identified.

There is a massive Achilles heel in Google’s pitch, as right now its TV lineup has some glaring omissions – most notably, the Fox and TimeWarner cable networks (including the Turner networks and HBO) as well as AMC. One wonders if those companies are trying to slow down what could prove to be a massive disruption to their business model, though Google did recently get the Disney networks, including ESPN, on board. By forcing neighborhoods to pay first before Google will connect them, it could also leave poorer neighborhoods out in the cold. Still, if it works (and many in the old guard are skeptical), I wonder if this could prove to be a paradigm shift in the cable industry, one pointing to a future of blurrier lines between TV and Internet, one where the infrastructure needed to bring both technologies into the future becomes cost-affordable by building it only in the places where it’ll be most profitable, and thus one where that future, one that blows the massive potential of the Internet wide open and where TV as we know it today ceases to exist, becomes a reality.

The Legacy of Homestuck and the Future of “Webcomics”

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In the Year of the Kickstarter, where The Order of the Stick and Penny Arcade have seen runaway success on the crowdfunding site (and you have no idea how pleased I was to find out PA didn’t end up passing OOTS and in fact barely even cracked half a million, or only double its goal), it shouldn’t be too surprising to find Homestuck jumping on the bandwagon as well, and it should surprise exactly no one to find out that it stands to blow them both out of the water. Consider that it’s a video game Kickstarter, and it’s a mortal lock. I wouldn’t be surprised to find it challenging the most-funded projects in Kickstarter history, even considering how crowded that category has gotten this year; OOTS is still in ninth place, though there’s an active drive that stands to knock it down to tenth. I really don’t think becoming the fifth project to crack $3 million is out of the question.

Really, the idea behind the project makes a ton of sense. Not only is Homestuck, like the rest of MSPA, structured like an old text-based adventure game, but Hussie’s original plan was to do it entirely in Flash, only switching back to images with only the occasional Flash when the all-Flash approach proved to be too much work. One thing I was struck by, going through this original “beta”, is that Homestuck was originally going to be much more like a video game. Icons appear signalling things that can be clicked, to the effect that upon reaching the command “Remove CAKE from MAGIC CHEST”, you are actually invited to click on the cake and move it to the bed. I was so intrigued by this that I actually started going through and trying to figure out how Homestuck might have played out if it was a video game of this sort, even with some breathing room for player choice, and got through Act 2 before burning out.

On the other hand, that is not what this project is. Rather, it’s an effort to create a sequel to Homestuck in video game form, set within the same universe but probably not using any of the same characters. As such, my interest is considerably weaker than it might have otherwise been (I finally got around to reading Problem Sleuth, and while it started out pretty funny, it just started dragging on and on and on), though I certainly see why Hussie says he couldn’t possibly go that route.

However, what I’m really here to talk about is something I was struck by in Gary “Fleen” Tyrell’s initial writeup of the Kickstarter. You can read it here, but I’ve copy-and-pasted the relevant bit because it’s so important, and pay special attention to the second paragraph:

Let me tell you a little bit about Andrew Hussie and Homestuck: I have been struggling to read it, because it’s damn voluminous, dense, stuffed silly with music and interaction and games and self- and forward- and back-references and completely, utterly not for me.

It is the opening shot of the native culture of the second generation of internet users — the ones that have always lived there, not those of us that immigrated from the Old (nondigital) Country within our living memory. And here’s a hint for everybody that still remembers the Old (nondigital) Country: there’s more of them and fewer of us every day, so maybe if your livelihood depends on putting content in front of eyeballs in some fashion, you ought to be paying all the attention you can muster to Mr Hussie and the fans whose brains he lives in.

There’s been a lot of question over what medium to call Homestuck; while it’s usually called a webcomic, it ultimately blends elements of webcomics and video games with something completely original. I mentioned in my original review that Scott McCloud would not only refuse to call it a webcomic but would question whether it even took the medium in a good direction to go in. As with “About Digital Comics” (and the very occasional imitators thereof that have appeared since, which I call “digital stage comics” for reasons that post should make clear, and which MSPA might be seen as a variant of), though, I believe it most definitely is a productive direction to go in, maybe even more so.

In Understanding Comics, McCloud mentioned the tendency for new media to be seen through the lens of the old, often borrowing tropes from their parent media before developing some tropes of their own. I had serious issues with the story of Homestuck when I initially archive-binged it (my reaction might be similar to Tyrell’s, right down to the use of the Penny Arcade Defense), but perhaps its real legacy is in its utter redefinition of what we think of as webcomics. It is quite possible that the entirety of what we have been calling “webcomics” for the last decade and a half is little more than the “seeing new media through the lens of the old” stage of a medium we might call “visual online entertainment” for lack of a better term, and in this perhaps Homestuck is its Citizen Kane. And if that’s the case, surely it represents the ultimate realization of McCloud’s infinite-canvas vision, even if McCloud himself might disdain it.

When I questioned how many members of a “greatest webcomics” list would still be on it within ten years if webcomics fully explored their potential as a medium, I had no idea where that potential might lead – which is why I called that series “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis“. And when I suggested that a potential “greatest webcomics” list “would include at least some comics we can’t even imagine today”, Homestuck was precisely what I was referring to, even if I didn’t know it.

Misconceptions about the Future of Television

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I have spoken often about a future in which television as we know it today no longer exists – where producers of television content, be they sports leagues or major studios, cut out the middleman and release their content directly to the people via the Internet. But on Wednesday I mentioned that such a future is at least a decade away, and to the reasons I gave in that post I would probably add the struggles people have had making money off video ads on the Internet. People don’t tolerate ads on the Internet in the same numbers they do on TV, though my anecdotal evidence suggests the tide may be turning on that front, and those ads don’t make nearly as much money as TV ads despite the lack of competition.

As such, it’s hard to imagine such a future at all, and it’s tempting to define it in terms of the structures that exist today. When I see much of the “old media”‘s streaming efforts consisting of Internet versions of their normal linear channels, when I see networks control streaming rights instead of studios, when I see access to shows continuing to be restricted by country, when I see that access to NBC’s Olympics streaming is controlled by your cable provider (regardless of ISP), I just shake my head. Such things are necessary in the present as we go through the awkward transition to the future, but I hope they don’t give anyone the wrong idea of what the future is going to be like.

For example, because the Internet video ad market isn’t mature and because of the nature of streaming of cable channels right now, it’s tempting to think the future won’t be much different from the ecosystem of channels that exist now, only with those channels that don’t offer live programming decoupling their lineup from a schedule. Most of the bigger-budget shows will be associated with some sort of “network” that charges substantial fees to Internet service providers to allow them to access their content, even if it’s just a brand name for content produced by a studio. It’s technically getting rid of the middleman, but in a way that mirrors the current TV landscape and, more importantly, preserves the revenues the biggest-budget productions require.

It’s also wrong. I don’t believe we’ll need to set up “barriers to entry” to pay for most of our TV shows, in part because I don’t believe it’s possible; “barriers to entry” is another word for “a reason to pirate”. Piracy is only going to get easier; I have on my computer RealPlayer SP, which pops up a button whenever I’m watching a video on the Internet to download the video to my computer. Not all videos can be downloaded, but there are videos with ads that can – and when I watch the version that RealPlayer downloaded, there are no ads. If a respected, legitimate video player is making piracy that easy, the fight against it might be futile.

We have shows that are paid for entirely through ads. They’re called broadcast television, and while it may be a wasteland now, that’s only because of the increased competition from cable; before cable came along, broadcast television had no shortage of groundbreaking shows. All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and the early seasons of The Simpsons (back when it was still good) all aired on broadcast; so did Star Trek, Hill Street Blues, and Twin Peaks. Even today there are independent producers making money by making high-quality videos on the Internet off ads alone (though probably the majority of the ones I know of use footage from older, more popular shows or otherwise relate to other things rather than be wholly original creations themselves). Today’s television landscape privileges those who take advantage of the “dual revenue streams” of advertising and subscriber fees; the Internet turns that on its head. It’s too democratic for every video producer to charge subscriber fees and succeed. I don’t believe pay-per-view or the equivalent of premium channels will go away entirely (Netflix seems to be becoming the HBO of Internet “premium channels”), but neither do I think the biggest budgets will become the sole province of movies either.

That said, I don’t want to discount that model entirely, but I would rather see it in a more decentralized form, where anyone can and does make money off of what they put on the Internet. Whenever you access a page, your ISP automatically pays the producer of whatever content you’re accessing, and passes the costs on to you. Had this model been in place from the beginning of the Internet we wouldn’t have spent the better part of two decades trying to figure out how to make money off the Internet and struggling through such gimmicks as micropayments. I’m not sure if it’s realistic now, and it could give ISPs a real incentive to attempt to repeal network neutrality laws so they can block sites they don’t like.

But I do think that one of these days, your bill for the Internet alone will start to rival what you pay now for cable and Internet combined, and producers will want to tap some of that. That may take the form of charging you directly for content, it may take the form of charging ISPs, or it may take the form of some variant of the automated-payment system I just laid out. Or it could be a combination of all of the above. But it’s not going to turn the Internet into the same cable TV model we have today.

USA Today and the Future of Journalism

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USA Today recently laid off a number of sports columnists as part of a broader restructuring of its sports department – and the vision they’ve set for their sports department going forward may well be a vision of the future for newspapers all over the country.

A leaked memo from publisher Larry Kramer effectively completely redefines USA Today Sports’ mission:

As we recast ourselves into a multi-platform sports organization, it is clear that we must be more aggressive and proactive about how we cover breaking news. While the newspaper remains an important source of news for our sports consumers, we can no longer operate with a print-first mentality. Stories move 24-7 and we need to move at that same rapid pace. The USA TODAY Sports Media Group intends to be the conversation starter, breaking news in Sports faster and in greater depth than anyone else.

It’s been said in the past that the Internet completely obliterates the traditional “news cycle”, giving people access to breaking news instantaneously. This has had its pluses and minuses, foremost among the latter the race to get scoops first potentially coming at the expense of getting them right. USA Today has effectively recognized that they are facing a future in which newspapers look increasingly obsolete, a drain on resources from the web site, and that the new world of the Internet is a far different world than the print world they’re leaving behind. This appears to be at least a first step towards embracing the new rules of the game. USA Today has generally been one of the “little three” of national general sports websites (alongside Sporting News/Fanhouse and NBC, and behind ESPN, CBS, Fox, SI, and Yahoo in some order), and they appear to be taking proactive steps to emerge from that status.

There’s a lesson here for newspapers all over the country looking to recast themselves in the new Internet age. They must effectively become less like newspapers, as they have known the term up to this point, gathering up all the stories they can for a single daily or weekly edition, and more like twenty-four-hour news networks, reporting the news as it happens. Certainly there will be people who just want to get the news in one big dose, but the core of that one big dose will utterly depend on being able to stay on top of all the news the moment it develops.

Catching up with the state of Kickstarter

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(From xkcd. Click for full-sized recursive fundraising.)

You know Kickstarter is catching on when Penny Arcade and xkcd are talking about it.

How big has it gotten in the time since I stopped keeping track? According to Wikipedia’s top-ten list, there are now five million-dollar Kickstarters, two of them finishing after I stopped, plus two more top-ten projects that finished earlier this month (which apparently had PA‘s help towards the end), plus another ongoing project that’s cracked the ten-million-dollar barrier. Wikipedia isn’t even keeping track of ongoing projects that would make the top ten like they did when the OOTS drive was ongoing, only the highest-grossing ongoing drive (though that may just be the only project slated to cross the threshold). The project when I was tracking drives was a little over $350,000; now it’s more than twice that.

Before, the main categories that contributed the highest-grossing projects tended to be Design and Technology, and to a lesser extent Film and Video. Now Games seems to be fast becoming another big-money category, maybe more than any of the others. Much as I’d hate to say it, I’d say this is definitely the Double Fine effect, not the OOTS Effect, at work; even the benefits to the Comics category aren’t really webcomic-specific any longer. OOTS may have raised more money than anyone thought possible, but Double Fine is completely reorganizing the economics of independent video-game production, and I suspect you’ll see, if you haven’t already, a bunch of people with nothing but a dream and a vague concept start Kickstarters they have no business of doing, possibly with the sole aim of “getting rich quick”.

Which brings us to the concern both of these comics seem to have. Kickstarter does not enforce the completion of any project promised; several people have noted that it’s a mechanism based on trust. The beauty of it is that, so far, people have trusted each other and delivered on that trust, and paranoia about the worst of human nature hasn’t borne fruit. But it’s easy to wonder whether people might read stories about the Double Fine crew or Rich Burlew becoming millionaires on Kickstarter and getting the wrong idea, that they can just beg for money and rake in the dough, or even whether that’s already started. I’d like to remain cautiously optimistic, and I’ll check in in a few months to verify my suspicions, but it’s hard not to wonder whether Kickstarter might not be submarined by its own success.

Idle thoughts on the future of journalism

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There’s a local story here in Seattle with tremendous import on the future of journalism. Publicola, a local news blog that was the first online-only site to be credentialed to cover the Washington State Legislature, will be shutting down with at least two contributors moving to another blog.

Because other similar blogs around here seem to be doing fine and Publicola was probably more popular than any of them, I felt that its failure suggested that they didn’t have a clue how to make money on the Internet. Then I read this comment that made me rethink it:

I always wondered how it was supposed to make money. To pay two full-time reporters you need at least, say $200 a day. To get to that, you may need a full-time ad salesperson which raises the requirement even further. That’s a lot of internet ads and a ton of traffic. They probably got just enough traffic to be relevant but not enough to make a living.

The other option would seem to be an NPR model, which they did not try, but would definitely require being a 501c3, which would limit what you could do politically (no endorsements, for example).

Is this the future of journalism? Are full-time reporters with full credentials and access no longer viable except at large scales? Will journalism become split between amateur “citizen journalists” with a tendency towards the “hyper-local” and the occasional opinion, and full-time reporters working for monolithic media organizations, either national or international outfits or one of only a handful of such large outfits in town, almost certainly a holdover from the old media, with little room for anything in the middle?

It’s possible Publicola tried to do too much too soon and couldn’t reach viability fast enough. Or it’s possible that there’s a blind spot in the current Internet viability model, one that, without additional revenue streams, could prove corrosive to the health of journalism, especially local-scale journalism, in the long run.

Windows Security Tools Missing after Malware/Virus Infection – How To Restore

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I’m starting to become a convert to the cause of Macs.

I spent much of the past week trying to clean up after my computer got hit with some malware, and I’m still not completely sure it’s entirely gone even after running multiple anti-malware and anti-virus programs for HOURS of my life I’ll never get back; two Windows background programs trigger anti-virus warnings and warnings from Windows Firewall when they shouldn’t, and I still can’t get to microsoft.com or any part of it without being redirected to a Hotmail login screen, on my laptop only.

The worst part, though, was that the virus apparently wiped all of Microsoft’s tools for protecting against malware and that sort of thing from the registry. That wouldn’t have been that bad, except Microsoft seems to be slow on the uptake about this for some reason, because I had to spend copious amounts of time hunting through various forum threads for every single program (not helped by the aforementioned microsoft.com issue) where the correct and rather simple solution was almost never the first one suggested and often reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows was brought up, often by supposedly trained Microsoft professionals, before some random dude shows up and solves the problem in a single link – always a link to a .reg file that, when run, puts the necessary stuff back in the registry automatically. (Not that I’m not considering reformatting and reinstalling anyway, given how far-reaching these tentacles are.)

So, in the possibly vain hope that no one else has to go through what I went through, I provide this handy list of the requisite .reg files to restore these programs to the registry. If I’m missing anything that should be there but isn’t, leave it in the comments. You may want to back up your registry before making any changes. Before starting, open the Start menu and click on the search box or “Run”, type services.msc, and run it, then verify that the below services are missing from the list.

Windows Security Center: wscsvc.reg (located inside ZIP file)

Windows Firewall: bfe.reg AND firewall.reg (You will need to run regedit from the Start menu search box or Run dialog, find the folder “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\BFE”, right-click on it, choose Permissions, and give at least yourself and possibly “Everyone” “full control” using the Add button; then go back to services.msc, find “Base Filtering Engine”, click it then click Start on the left side of the window, then click Windows Firewall, and click Start in the same place)

Windows Defender: windefend.reg

You will need to make sure to restart your computer after running these.

An open letter to the Internet Explorer team:

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If I exit Internet Explorer, and certain processes/pages don’t close for whatever reason, and I have to use the task manager to close them…

…then when I reopen Internet Explorer, the pages associated with the processes I had to close manually shouldn’t be the only ones that reopen.

Of course, what you should really have is an option to automatically resume the last session upon starting again (instead of hunting through the menu unless it crashed) like, I don’t know, EVERY OTHER BROWSER IN EXISTENCE.

(Still ticked off after planning to write a big post about Fox’s new Saturday night sports experiment and get a few other things done besides and instead spending most of my free time all day having to wipe the SAME piece of malware off my computer TWICE…)