Here are the results of the survey that ran last Thursday. Here in 2011 – nearly a decade and a half after newspaper’s began putting content on line for free – the results aren’t that surprising.
In my household, we subscribe to a paper (I started the subscription the day the Rocky Mountain News closed), but honestly I don’t read it. I don’t have time in the mornings to sit down and read it and by the evening when I get home from work, I’ve got the headlines from NPR and Twitter. My wife tends to read it daily. While I purchased the subscription out of a loss and fear of losing a trusted local news source, if my wife wasn’t reading it, I’d have cancelled the paper by now.
I get my comics in my email box.
Thanks, Alan and after raising the question I’ve got one more:
how do and will creators get paid?
Assuming that nobody over a certain age pays for a newspaper sub. in order to read comics -consistently measured as one of the reasons readers pick up ANY paper (and that your grandma isn’t reading TDC or weighed in on the poll).
These same “payers” are reading BLONDIE, SNUFFY SMITH and PEANUTS from 1964. This ain’t complicated: the demographic that’s paying the bills are wearing velcro shoes and own burial plots.
But there are popular features today that enjoy popularity and followings. Yet this brief survey suggest they’re being consumed like kids watching a ballgame thru a knot hole. (now THERE’S an old people metaphor)
No judgment passed, just an observation. I like Oliphant but he’s not in anything to which I subscribe so I see him online. I’d love someone to tell me that web advertising rates are increasing. -please.
I found the poll rather limiting in that you only had one choice. I subscribe to two local papers, and peruse several on-line sources, and occasionally foreign news sites.
The same with comics; about 24% of those I follow are from the papers, and the rest are on-line, because either the local papers don’t carry them, or they’re on-line only.
I find it ironic that people take time to visit the Daily Cartoonist and complete a reader poll, but they don’t read comics … What are you DOING here???
That would be like me visiting Stitch n’ Bitch (name of my mother’s sewing club) and sipping their tea.