Websnark

Comment from: John Troutman posted at February 28, 2008 6:57 PM

There are HUGE changes in store. I can't actually mention them, but there are.

If nothing else, Dan as CTO is just peachy - he's been doing most of the day-to-day tech work on Keenspot for at least a year now.

Comment from: Tangent posted at February 29, 2008 12:04 AM

Ah. I wonder if this (the extra duties as CTO) is half the reason why Dan keeps missing updates. Not that it really matters these days. EGS is moving toward my "check once a month" category, due partly to the inconsistent updates and partly due to my growing disappointment in his storytelling.

Considering the state of the industry... Keenspot has to start growing lest it fade away in the wake of the changing webcomic industry. I'm glad to hear that the company's administration has consolidated; I know that the fractured nature of who runs it has kept at least one comic from joining Keenspot and probably more. And something does need to be done about the cartoonists who join Keenspot and then suddenly stop updating. Being a member of Keenspot shouldn't be like tenure at a university: the cartoonist should work hard to keep up productivity and quality as it benefits both Keenspot and the cartoonist's own readership.

I look forward to hearing what will be happening in the next year, John.

Robert A. Howard, Tangents Reviews

Comment from: Christopher B. Wright posted at February 29, 2008 12:39 AM

It shouldn't be like "tenure at a university?" What the hell does that mean? Do you know what tenure is?

Keenspot membership is not an employer-employee relationship. At least, it wasn't when I was there, and I doubt it's changed since then.

Comment from: Tangent posted at February 29, 2008 1:31 AM

Meaning it's much easier to stay in than get in. I've yet to see a comic removed from Keenspot because of inconsistent updating, while you need a regular update schedule prior to it and a decent readership.

And Keenspot is a business. Regularly-updating comics are the bread and butter that help draw in readers and keep them in. Perhaps with a few guidelines (such as a widespread push for buffers among the cartoonists) inconsistency can be eliminated and Keenspot can in turn draw in more web traffic and increase its own profits (which in turn results in more profits for the cartoonists).

I understand real life gets in the way of things. I understand that few people at Keenspot do this as their full-time job. But that shouldn't keep Keenspot as an organization from working to improve its craft as a whole.

If you're offended by that, well, join the crowd. I offend a lot of people it seems.

Rob H.

Comment from: Christopher B. Wright posted at February 29, 2008 2:51 AM

This ain't about you, Robert. This is about a trope you are parroting that is a lot less true than the people who say it over and over again like to think it is.

("Tenure," by the way, is a status created by colleges and universities to afford valued professors protection from collegiate politics. The point of tenure is that it allows professors who have it to take positions and voice opinions that may be unpopular with the Board of Directors, the president of the university/college, your random Dean, etc. The downside of tenure is that when some professors get it they sit around on their ass all day -- but to use the term to mean only that is a gross misrepresentation of what it is.)

Yes, Keenspot is a business. It is also rather culturally unique as far as 'webcomic institutions" go -- at least, as far as I can tell it is -- and the reason it is has a lot to do with the way things were when it first started out.

Right before Keenspot came to be, your publishing choices were pretty simple:

The Geocities route: there were sites that offered "free" webhosting as long as you displayed their mandatory banner ads. (Actually at one point in time Geocities was a really interesting place. Sort of a precursor to Blogspot but organized like Gopher -- who remembers Gopher?)

The Self-Hosting route: You rented space on a webhosting provider. If you had a domain name as well you were shiny.

The Other-Hosting route: someone published your comic on their site. PvP started out this way by being published on a gaming magazine. Help Desk started out this way by being published on an OS/2 webzine. We both moved to the Self-Hosting route.

The Big Panda option: some of the webcomics were using Big Panda as their webhost, and it was trying to evolve into something interesting, but it never got there.

The Horrible, Dangerous Razor-Blade-Strewn MP3.com-Knockoff Hosting Plan: Does everyone remember the original MP3.com? It was an interesting site before it went public. Basically you created an account on MP3.com and you were given a location on the site, then you uploaded your music to that location. Visitors could either go directly to your spot on mp3.com (mine was, for example mp3.com/artist/baptistdeathray, if I remember correctly) or they could browse through the Mp3.com "charts", which allowed you to look at all the artists in a particular genre, or see what the most popular downloads were, etc. MP3.com was not particularly evil in those days (compard to the labels they were saints) but when you uploaded music to their site you were automatically allowing them to include your music on samplers that they could distribute as promotional material without paying you anything for the trouble. It was, at the time, considered a pretty good deal.

Well, the webcomic world had a few things that popped up that were trying to use that model -- you'd create an account on the site, you'd load your comic, and they would publish it, along with all the other comics that were also using the service, and have similar lists etc. I even used it one or two times... before I noticed that their terms of service was a bit more flat-out batshit crazy than MP3.com's could ever have hoped to be. Essentially when you uploaded a comic to one of these sites you were RELINQUISHING ALL RIGHTS TO YOUR PRODUCT. They could do ANYTHING with a comic you uploaded to that site and not pay you a cent. And what you got in exchange was "the chance to be published" -- in other words, the chance for your little comic to be sitting on their site.

I don't know if anyone else from back then remembers it, but there were more than a few of those sites -- those were the *first* "webcomic collectives," and they were scams set up by someone who thought they might be able to milk the naive enthusiasm of artists who were mostly just seeing what they could do.

This is the backdrop that Keenspot started in -- oddly enough it doesn't get mentioned in any of the "official histories" that talk about those times. But other than Big Panda, which for the most part was a somewhat sophisticated (for the time) webcomic ranking system with a side venture to become a webcomic hosting site, the only "web publishing collectives" or what have you were sites that lured artists in with the message "get exposure for your comic!" and then STOLE that from them because nobody ever reads the EULA.

Keenspot's pitch, when they first sent it out, pretty solidly set it on the other side of that. They made very clear that your comic was yours at all times. The only requirement they made was that your comic be published on Keenspot, and only Keenspot -- though they made some exceptions on a case-by-case basis (for example, for a while a guy was translating Help Desk into Portuguese and posting that on his site, with Keenspot's and my permission). In fact, the Keenspot Artist Agreement contract seemed designed specifically to protect the artist's independence *from* Keenspot as much as it was designed to spell out what their obligations to it were. And that was pretty much what sold me on them -- if the agreement had been anything else I would have dismissed them as another one of those rights-stealing scam sites I mentioned earlier.

(Amusing side story: the original Keenspot propsal was emailed out as a PDF file that was so large I thought it was a virus and I deleted it without reading it the first time they sent it.)

Anyway, the point is that the freedom Keenspot gave its artists meant that the relationship between Keenspot and its artists was not an employer/employee relationship. Keenspot could not make demands on the artist in terms of what kind of work to produce. It couldn't censor an artists content. It was suddenly faced with problems like "what do we do when an adult-themed webcomic decides to post a risque newsbox that would appear on a family-oriented Keenspot webcomic?"

And they had problems with regular updates. Yes, if you give artists enough freedom there's a danger they'll take that freedom, braid it into a rope and then then hang themselves with it. That said? The bulk of Keenspot comics kept to their schedule. The problem is that one or two popular ones (like Avalon High) got erratic and were ultimately abandoned and a few really popular ones (like Living in Bayside and Bobbins) stopped. Along with that a few artists had crises in the real world that forced them to withdraw from the internet pretty much altogether for a time. But their archives were still on the site and looked like they were still part of Keen proper, so people kept going there. One site that had stopped publishing altogether had been so popular that it was still generating more revenue than I did on my best quarter.

*That* was the thing Keenspot hadn't actually thought through at the time: how to deal with archives that people still wanted to view while making it clear that they weren't part of the regular roundup any more. Eventually they came up with the Active/Inactive lists that they updated from time to time, but even then if you went to an inactive comic it was still branded as an active one, which caused confusion. Changing the color of the keenbar and adding a "Hiatus" or "Ended" or something to that effect on the site itself would have gone a long way towards solving that problem, but hindsight is 20/20.

This, combined with a general gleeful propsensity from the "webcomic community" to bash Keenspot at every opportunity, gave birth to the "go to Keenspot and quit updating" trope. Wheee.

Truth told, Keenspot's organizational model did not make it 100% business-friendly, which infuriated a few artists who complained about it bitterly. It was the Continental Congress of webcomics, with all the organizational dysfunction that the original Continental Congress had... only unlike in American History, Keenspot didn't fall apart and get replaced by a Republic (though maybe Chris's announcement is the first of the webcomic Federalist Papers -- we'll see). It kept succeeding (or at the very least, it kept not going under) at every point where people said it would fail -- including when the dot-com bubble burst and web-based ventures started falling over left and right -- because it inspired a tremendous amount of loyalty from its members because of that very same contract that set it up for those inconsistent and erratic update schedules.

I think when people approach webcomics primarily in terms of it being a business they miss a lot and wind up with a very short-sighted view of what can and cannot work. And while there are certainly parts of Keenspot that could use work, it seems flat-out stupid, in my view, to try to make it become more like the other webcomic business models out there. You might be able to solve one or two of its weaknesses that way but you'll damn sure cut way at some of its strengths as well.

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