A Funny Thing Happened to the Cartoon Business

The cartoon world has been rocked by the fallout of the newspaper industry decline. Syndicates such as United Media, King Features and Creators Syndicate have based their revenue on a combination of sales to newspapers for their comics page, book sales of comic strip collections and licensing of the most popular comic strip characters for product endorsements. As newspapers go out of business, the comics page market is drying up. This is having a major effect on the income of syndicated cartoonists, especially those who have not been able to derive significant income from book sales and licensing. Syndicates are now focused more than ever on licensing characters such as Garfield, Snoopy and the hilarious pair from 'Get Fuzzy'-Bucky the cat and Satchel the dog.

The cartoonists whose strips and panels have derived less income from character licensing are being hurt the most in financial terms. There is a decreasing possibility of being able to make a living from newspaper
sales alone. Sales of comics to online newspaper publishers remains a very iffy proposition, since the newspapers themselves have been unable to prosper at this point from online reader subscriptions. The newspaper industry is counting on making the bulk of their online income from advertising sales. That model may provide enough income in the future, but because of the recession the ad dollars have taking a hit.

Already established online stock cartoon companies, such as CartoonResource.com and CartoonStock have focused on what will possibly be the new syndicated model-custom cartoons using popular comic characters to feed the niche web community market. There will be a race between old media syndicates and new media cartoon agencies. The winner will be the one who survives long enough to reach the new income producing model of online cartoon content.

Andrew Grossman is a business owner, columnist, writer, cartoonist and online content business expert. His online column, Daily Content Comment, can be found at www.andrewgrossman.net. DCC provides up-to-the-moment info on business partnerships, technology breakthroughs and copyright law rulings and their effect on the online content business.

Andrew Grossman was one of the pioneers of the online business model for selling creative content. In 2000, he launched CartoonResource.com, a cartoon licensing agency. With a worldwide clientele in print, presentation and advertising media, CartoonResource.com helped show that online content was profitable.

In 2008 he purchased rights to several creative content databases, and created
AllContentNetwork.com. ACN syndicates popular features such as the advice column,
'I Fought the Law' and the social networking comic, 'letsCu'.

His articles on the online sales model have appeared in Folio, Editor & Publisher, Brandweek, Barrons, The Wall Street Journal and other titles. His cartoons have appeared in thousands of newspapers, magazines and book collections around the world, including The New Yorker, Stern, The Washington Post and Mainichi Daily News.