Blog of Webcomics’ Identity Crisis: The Dark Cloud in “Good News”

Ursula Vernon’s Digger is moving to its own site, and Vernon treats it as a cavalcade of good news. Even the secondary announcement that Digger is becoming free is arguably burying the lead:

It will also be going off subscription, and over to advertising–Graphic Smash is pretty much abandoning the subscription model. I’m pleased that we’ll get more traffic as a result, and that people will finally get to read the whole archives for free, but I also find myself wanting to do something nice for all my faithful subscribers, who quite literally paid my rent a couple of times–without them, Digger would have been abandoned long ago, and I owe them big time for having sustained me and my comic so wonderfully and well. (emphasis added)

As it stands, there are already only three active webcomics that are still running on the subscription model at Graphic Smash, and Digger is one of them. If the remaining two become free as well, as may be implied here, it’s a bad sign for anyone else looking to put their webcomic behind a subscription wall.