Bonus Post: Phil Foglio Encumbered by Publisher's Demise

Today's Bleeding Cool features a piece on Girl Genius co-creator, Phil Foglio, and the trouble he's found himself in having learned that the company that publishes the novels based on his Girl Genius graphic novels is going out of business.

According to Foglio's Facebook page...

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Friday Archive Dive: Thinking Outside the Box When Selling Ads

Q:  I was creepin' through cbsinteractive.com/advertise/ recently and stumbled on their self-serve options. The thing that stuck out to me was that they were offering ad space within their newsletters.

I know lots of comics offer their strips through email, and that the "e-newsletter" format is popular for including blog posts and discount codes...but this is honestly the first time it ever occurred to me to use that as an advertising opportunity. For CBS' gaming website, GameSpot, a 160x600 ad in their newsletter costs a flat fee of $1,300.

Another important point is that, for GameSpot at least, these ads are even targeted! They seem to be keeping track of which subscribers own which consoles; if you only want to run your ad for PlayStation fans, you can do that and (presumably) the ad will only be in the newsletters for users that said, somewhere, that they owned PlayStations.

Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but this is blowing my mind. I thought it was worth bringing to the community, and I am particularly interested in hearing your reaction.

-- Graham Hamilton

A. Let's face it, when it comes to selling advertising, many of us are way behind the curve. We use plug-and-play services like Project Wonderful and Pulse Pulse (which used to be called ContextWeb, which used to be called ADSDAQ), and that's about the extent of our outreach....

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Bonus Post: Lame obit cartoons

So, everyone with a social-media log-in is smugly rolling their eyes over lame Roger Ebert obituary cartoons. Gene Siskel hands Roger a bag of popcorn in a heavenly theater... St. Peter gives Ebert the "thumbs-up,"... etc.

We all agree. They're pretty unimaginative.

Now, here's where the rubber meets the road.

How would you (or did you) do it better?

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Bonus Post: Louis C.K. and webcomics

Thank-you to Tom Racine, of Tall Tales Radio, for passing this along.

In today's New York Times, comedian Louis C. K. is interviewed.

You may be familiar with Louis from the notariety he received by using Paypal to circumvent Ticketmaster's stranglehold on the ticket sales for his performances, and for his selling a DRM-free video of his stand-up as a $5 download.

What he says here is especially relevant to members of this site: 

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Gary Tyrrell: Inside the "Committee of Six"

Last week, we had an intense discussion of the nominating process of the online comics categories of the NCS's Divisional Awards. The arguments became circular very quickly, and at the end, I didn't understand it any more clearly than I did when the thread started. And I really wanted to understand it better.

One of my main concerns was always been the committee of six. It has always been presented as a mechanicism to vet the professionalism of webcartoonists and suggest un-submitted cartoonists whose work should be considered. And that first part always rubbed me the wrong way.

So I went to someone who I felt could accurately shed some light on the topic -- one of the members of the NCS's "committee of six" for the past two years, Gary Tyrrell, who writes the webcomics news blog, Fleen.com. 

That interview is below.

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