No, I haven’t changed my views about the Internet. However, the tragedy of the commons applies here. Once one cartoonist is willing to give it away, others have to “compete” in the race to the bottom of the financial barrel (to garble a metaphor).

Moreover, archives are the area where it doesn’t hurt a cartoonist to offer work for free online. To the contrary, it adds to the possibility of reprint sales for work that otherwise would languish in obscurity–in old cartoon collections and newspapers in landfills.

I further believe that online archives won’t hurt book sales. Fans will always want to read comics in a nice bound format. The ultimate evidence of that is the success of the big A&M Far Side and C&H collections. Most of them were sold to fans who already own the paperbacks that contained most of the work that is in the new books.

I can’t think of a single thing that the newspaper offers that I can’t get in a better way online.

What Web news sources do better than print:
Searchability
Archived articles

What print newspapers do better than Web news sources:
Serendipity (increased likelihood you will read an article with a headline that doesn’t immediately appeal to you
Portability (can’t read the Internet at the beach

and–to me this is the clincher–

You can’t actually READ a Web newspaper. Screens hurt your eyes; you have to stand still in front of a screen for a long time. And most people don’t actually read Web newspapers; they skim headlines and read one or two articles all the way through. The NYT found that Web readers spend something like 7 minutes with NYTimes.com and that print readers read for 44 minutes. (A 27-year-old friend of mine recently developed RSI and started reading the print NYT instead of the online version. Now that she realizes how little she was actually reading before, she won’t go back to online.)

This fact is also why the Web is unlikely (being charitable here) to replace print as the primary income source for the news business. Advertisers know that Web readers don’t pay much attention to ads online, so they pay a lot less for them. That could change, but only if reading an online “newspaper” were to become more pleasant and more portable. As things stand, print will continue to generate 90 percent-plus of news revenues for the foreseeable future.

Again, comics should help sell newspapers. Putting syndicated content online devalues comics because people don’t have to buy the newspaper to read their comics. They don’t have to write to the newspaper editor asking him to carry their favorite strip.

Newspapers used to compete for comics. This increased their value. Newspaper competition is practically non-existent today, but offering free syndicated content online does disservice to newspapers and cartoonists. It further devalues comics and removes a competitive edge that newspapers should have.

If the syndicates abruptly removed all comics from their respective websites, after having built up a large online readership, perhaps people would start clamoring for their local newspapers to carry the comics they like to read. Maybe the syndicates should remove the comics while ASKING readers to do so. Maybe it wouldn’t work, but it’s just crazy enough.

Putting syndicated comics on the web in the first place was a bad move and an affront to both newspapers and cartoonists. After ten years, the syndicates have failed to produce any profitable marketing model for comic strips on the Web.

Newspapers and syndicates both fell for the notion that print newspapers were going to die and that the web would be their savior. When so many have virtually given upon newspapers, it’s no wonder that the industry continues to weaken… even though there is plenty of evidence showing the strength and potential of both print newspapers and comic strips helping to keep papers viable.

There used to be a symbiotic relationship between newspapers and comic strips, and that relationship needs to be fostered aggressively. Maybe Dr. Phil could help.

At my job, I can’t access comics.com on the Windows ME computer. On the Vista computer, I can access the site, but I can’t log in, so I don’t know if the MyComics page is fixed yet (haven’t been trying at home, on the weekdays I read my comics at work on my breaks). At least it’s been changed to load just the day’s comic on each comic’s page now, instead of ten — I’m sure that clobbered their bandwidth.

I’m also using an adblocker, so I don’t see their ads, but overall it does look cluttered.