Driving away the customer

I have long been a fan of newspaper style comics. In my “open the sites all at once” bucket of URLs in Safari, I have 10 daily comics.

Or had, anyway.

King Features publishes Mother Goose And Grimm and Zits. Both cartoons that I quite like. Unfortunately, I won’t be reading them on a daily basis anymore.

King Features has changed their “archive policy” such that they are now only publishing the first week of cartoons for each month. To gain receive the full cartoon, they want $15/year + a $3 “handling fee”. Why the hell they need a “handling fee” on an entirely electronic transaction is well beyond my meager intellect.

Apparently, King Features is incapable of imagining a business model that is anything but the traditional sell syndication rights to the newspaper. Good thinking, that. I mean, it isn’t like newspaper circulation hasn’t been declining for 20 years. Clearly, King Features decision to tie its business to one that is slowly failing must have been very well considered.

At the other end of the spectrum, King Features’ competitor Comics.com has this whole Internets thing totally figured out. You can read any of their comics — Snoopy, Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Marmaduke, etc.. — for free, subsidized by banner ads. Comics.com also offers puzzles, games, extensive archives, email services, and a slew of other products along a graduated subscription scale that starts at FREE. Throughout the site, comics.com consistently upsells the customer in a relatively non-annoying fashion.

In other words, comics.com gets it. Whether or not they are making money, I have no clue. At least they have embraced the internet and seem to have put together a well considered product.

King Features, on the other hand, falls into the MPAA/RIAA head-in-the-sand school of business. Your failed business model is not my problem.

That King Features has decided to commit corporate seppuku would simply be pathetically amusing if they weren’t also dragging down some otherwise very entertaining comics.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 7th, 2005 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Irritants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.