Robert Khoo: Webcomics, the model
Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 5:00AM For those who don't know, my background is primarily in management consulting. It was a career filled with two-week stints in hostile environments that, in short, needed to figure out how to achieve X with the means of Y. Even though I specialized in enterprise technology, each segment was a little different and each company had their own way of doing things. In order to cope with these variances within tight timetables, every consultant had these very broad-stroke models beat into our heads to help understand how certain industries ticked. Businesses are businesses, but there are certain base-layer truisms across the board, often portrayed as simplified charts or graphs that give an easy-to-understand perspectives that, although usually fitting no single company, gave you an understanding on what the landscape was.
From those experiences I've been permanently wired to think that way. Everything I see has structure. There's always some sort of system, and no matter how organic the scenario, I immediately compartmentalize it into something that I can base my thinking and learning on.
That said, I figured I'd be a good exercise for my initial piece to give the webcomic space a go, as we could base future discussions and discourse on it. By no means is it the end-all, be-all snapshot of the industry, but it's a solid starting point in which to gain perspective from. You guys are paying for this stuff, so I'll try to use as many hard numbers as I can to give you a good idea of what category you may fall into. I'll also preface this by saying again, not everyone will fit into this paradigm, as there are always exceptions to any ecosystem.