A little late but catching up on an interesting book - REMIX by Larry Lessig covers his thoughts on the emergence of hybrid business models - meshing sharing and commercial economic activity in ways that respect and reinforce those separate spheres of human activity (sharing - think helping out a neighbor; commercial - think buying food).

It made me think back to the experience with Comixpedia/TALK this decade.  I can't say I know what every original participant's motivations were.  There was no clear or even explicit "business" plan.  I know I wanted to write and find an audience for that writing.  I also thought there was a niche to be filled as it didn't seem that anyone was giving webcomics attention (that's all different now - all comics-focused media seems to treat webcomics as comics).

The problem was we were making a little bit of money from ads.  Not much but some.  At some point I experimented with paying a little to contributors.  In retrospect it didn't help much to bring in more articles.  The small amount of money probably only served to reinforce how little value the commercial economy placed upon our efforts (and we never paid ourselves for all of the editing, managing, etc tasks around the website) which was in stark contrast to the sharing side of things.  In non-money terms I felt pretty rewarded for writing (and still do actually).

This year, we've shifted back to an entirely community-driven contributor system which means nothing much more than I ditched the "feature" article system we'd had since we started.  No more edited articles, no more small payments to writers for longer articles, reviews, interviews.  (It was good timing for my pocketbook as ad revenues dropped off a lot this year). 

But... there still seems to be a lot of content on the site -- I'm the primary producer of original content on the site this year (that's probably always been true but even more so this year) but opening blogging (and especially the import of blogging from outside blogs) on ComixTALK from interested writers has meant that I have lots of stories to review when deciding what to put on the front page each day.

I want to mix things up again but I don't have a clear vision of how to do that yet.  I'm not primarily interested in money (I try not to lose money but that's about it) -- I'm interested in the non-money side of things. What I'd like to do is identify what's missing in webcomics or what could be done better than it is right now. 

Here's what I don't think ComixTalk needs to do anymore:

• I don't need to collect "links" -- Journalista does a amazing vacuum of the web each day (and Dirk Deppey has consistently included webcomics and other digital media stories in his reporting).
• I don't need to provide a forum for creators to swap experience or share information on craft, business, etc.  Webcomics.com does an excellent job of this, backed up by four successful comics creators.
• I certainly don't need to review work or interview creators (although I like to do that so I suspect I will continue that kind of writing) because most comics-related sites include webcomics in their reporting now.  And there's a lot of sites for comics that are catholic in their coverage (and don't obsess over superhero comics).

Maybe in the next post I can start throwing out ideas I've been collecting this year -- see if any of them make sense after trying to explain them in writing...