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This is a re-post from the Webcomics.com archive. If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good example.

If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire.  For less than three bucks a month, you can get a steady flow of information, tutorials and advice targeted towards your webcomic business — plus a private forum to discuss issues with other professionally minded cartoonists.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, ad rates are plummeting in the opening weeks of January (as they usually do). One of the best ways of weathering this storm is to maximize the ad revenue you are generating. Here’s an easy step-by-step primer on doing just that.

If you use Google DFP to manage your ads, this is simple.

Setting a Rate

The Rate is the CPM price at which Google AdSense competes with the ad defined in your Line item. (Except for House ads, which uses Value CPM to define this competition).

To calculate the number that you should use as a Rate, you’ll have to log-in to your ad network and find two statistics for each ad unit: Fill rate and CPM.

Note: I would limit my data to the last seven days. I don’t want those high December ad rates to skew my numbers.

Multiply the CPM your ad is earning by the fill rate. For example, if I’m getting a CPM of $1.50 for a skyscraper ad through PulsePoint — but my Fill rate is 25%…

1.5 x .25 = .375

Therefore, I’d set my Rate at $0.38

Now… you can update these rates as often as you’d like. You can adjust these rates daily, weekly, monthly, annually… or never, for that matter. But, obviously, the close this rate matches what’s happing for each of your ad networks, the better your ads are going to perform.

For example, if you’re getting $.40 CPM for a leaderboard through Tribal Fusion and your Rate is set to $0.50, then Google can’t replace the Tribal Fusion ad with a better-paying AdSense ad — at least not until Tribal Fusion reaches $0.50. And if that never happens, you’re going to be stuck getting a $0.40 CPM.

For more DFP tips and tutorials, check out this post from the archives and this one, too.

You don’t need a subscription to read today’s post!

This is a re-post from the Webcomics.com archive. If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good example.

If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire.  For less than three bucks a month, you can get a steady flow of information, tutorials and advice targeted towards your webcomic business — plus a private forum to discuss issues with other professionally minded cartoonists.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the future of webcomics. We’re in a period of significant upheaval, and rather than be frightened, I’m focusing on the opportunities that present themselves in such times.

I’ve written how social media has evolved the typical webcomics reader from a forager to someone who is force-fed. And I think that the way we handle that issue is going to define our future as content creators.

I’ve also written that I think many of us are going to have to turn to a subscription-based model (such as either Patreon or a traditional subscription-based Web site). Some of you got confused, thinking I was proposing this as the better method of serving readers. If this is you, I want you to read that post again carefully. It’s not the better choice — especially from the standpoint of readers. However, once ad revenue is removed, it just might be the only choice you have, if your goal is to earn an income through your self-published comics.

If you need any real-word examples of how this is playing out against the broader landscape, simply look to the announcement for the new Star Trek series. It’s not coming to Netflix or Hulu. Rather, it’s coming to CBS All Access — the network’s own subscription-based delivery service. Throw in other existing services such as HBO Go, and it’s clear to see that a fantasy/sci-fi fan is going to have to keep several subscriptions going to continue watching shows like Daredevil, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and so on.

The same thing is going to happen in comics, folks.

And the results aren’t all bad. For example, once we remove ad revenue from the equation, we’re free to rethink many things that were no-brainers for over a decade of Web publishing. And one of the biggies is this…

The archive

The archive was once the webcartoonist’s secret weapon. A big archive meant big ad-revenue dollars. Binge-readers generated significant returns on CPM advertising, and long,winding archives means plenty of SEO-based opportunities for a new reader to discover you.

Although SEO discovery is still important, ad revenue is a much smaller factor than it was a few years ago.

As a result, there’s a much smaller reward for keeping that archive readily available to binge-readers. Instead, I’m giving serious consideration to putting the majority of my archive behind a subscription wall. Once some clever coders use Patreon’s API to build a way to incorporate my patrons into my personal Web site, I can offer that subscription-based archive to my patrons as yet another reward.

I would, of course, keep a healthy chunk of my recent work available for free reading. After all, that’s the best way to turn a new reader into a fan. But my goal now will be to leave just enough free content on my site to convert a fan… and then convince that fan to be a subscriber. After all, only a fan is going to subscribe to get deep-archive access. Finding that sweet spot is going to take a little experimenting. But I think it’s got tremendous promise as a revenue source.