Flowerlark Studios

You might have noticed that for the first time in almost a decade, FL Studios now has ads. After the demise of the amazing bid-based ad exchange, Project Wonderful, a lot of us small-time, social-media-impaired comic artists felt despair over how we could direct traffic to our sites without spending ridiculous amounts of money on ads, what with social media giants taking all the internet’s traffic away from personal websites. Now Comicad Network is seeking to fill the void left by Project Wonderful. It’s still very small, so only time will tell how viable it is for bringing in new readers, but I have hopes that it will grow bigger as we comic artists spread the news. Right now it’s acting more like a link exchange, and it feels unfair for me to place ads on others’ sites without reciprocating. Because back in the day, we webcomic artists shared our readers. We had webrings, exchanges, and worked hard to push each others’ work into the spotlight. As social media became more and more prevalent, that mutual support dried up, and it became every artist for themselves. Accumulating ‘likes’ and ’shares’ became more important than having a community, and those who couldn’t ‘go viral’ got left behind. Which is why I feel it’s important that we comic artists start supporting each other again; we need to bring back that attitude of having a community rather than chasing whatever social media deems popular for the next 10 minutes.