If you are a in the content producing industry, and that’s the vast majority of my readers, you’ll want to visit Business Insider. They posted the slide deck to a presentation given at IGNITION: Future of Digital given by Henry Blodget, Alex Cocotas and Marcelo Ballvé. In it it sums up several trends that are affecting the comic industry. Growth of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), advertising trends, what content is being purchased online, how people use their mobile devices, etc. Some of the information is well known. The stats and trends are updated.
It will take you 10–15 minutes to scroll through it. Bottom line. If you’re going to be cartooning beyond the next 10 years, you need to start planning for it now. If these trends are any indication – you’ll be producing content in the freemium model, directly to readers through a mobile device.
This is a very concise aggregate of data, useful to any visual artist or musician. Thank you for posting it Alan!
Instead of dreading the dying print market for cartoonists salaries, we should study this information carefully and imagine a creative future derived from, but perhaps not described in this deck.
I have to think the future may be brighter if we shed the restrictions that bound George Herriman, Roy Crane and Walt Kelly. You may say I’m a dreamer…
But you’re not the only one.