CLICKBAIT

Our Current Fate as Online Creators

We have known for some time, and talked about, the fact that in these days we all have to be sales people as well as creators - unless we were lucky enough to build the kind of EPIC name recognition that presented our work to millions of people at some point or other within the last few decades. Usually their work merited the attention, and good luck to them. I have no issue with that! Neither do I have an issue with the superstars who get - or can afford - the special treatment that bigger publishers can offer them. Publishers need their big-name creators as much as they need the big-name IP. It's not always fair, but it's certainly understandable!

But for most of the rest of us, our work gets seen not merely based on the fact that we are hard-working, and ideally very good at what we do, but based on how we market ourselves. And that's increasingly a problem, because the internet has changed, and we're all working the kind of hours that makes signing tours, convention appearances, or long rambling podcasts, hard, if not impossible, to do. It's changed in that the audiences we spent YEARS online building - sometimes decades - are suddenly only reachable if we pay. Unless we're viral, we're not relevant. Unless we're helping get eyeballs on completely unrelated honeytraps and clickbait (indeed, unless we're clickbait ourselves) then we're of little to no use. And even if we DO pay, our ads go out to people who don't care about what we do, and as such prove futile.

I also read, recently, that comic websites in general are not getting any traction because they don't get the kind of views that the big platforms want. We're small fry, even though we're a multi-billion dollar industry.

And it all feels such a horribly missed opportunity! Because, like micro-payments, our smaller levels of connectivity DO matter. Communities begin with as little as three people. Fifty can constitute a village. A few hundred, a town. So cutting us off from our few thousand followers is a terrible oversight, and a big mistake. Making us pay to reach the audiences we built for ourselves on these platforms is not just wrong, it's really stupid and very short-sighted.

Sadly, there's almost nothing, it seems, we can do about it. We don't all have the skills, time or capacity to make YouTube content. We're not all up for dancing on TikTok. We can't join every new network as the ones we trusted fail and fall.

In the end we have to trust that those who appreciate our efforts continue to seek us out, and support us. I think it's why I see, so often, some of the finest of us represented as 'under-rated'. It's felt we don't get the traction, the marketing, the wide-spread name recognition we might deserve. But then, these times don't permit it. It's much harder won, much harder to be a break-out - and I've found that you need to break out much more than once in your career to truly survive it, unless you go supernova!

And alas, supernovas are rare indeed.