ComicFury as a webcomic host & Crowdfunding

[comicfury.livejournal.com]

Hello there, crowdfunding community. I am Kyo, and I am an Administrator as well as the owner of ComicFury.com.

So yeah, we offer free Webcomic hosting, you can click that link to get to our Site. 10 days ago a lovely lady named Elizabeth contacted me and asked me introduce ComicFury to the crowdfunding community and talk about it a bit, options for crowdfunding on it and such. To be honest I'm not really sure what's expected of me here, so bear with me;

First, let me explain a bit what ComicFury is all about. We offer free Webcomic Hosting, which means that we give you an easily managable website to put your webcomics online, and some free advertising on the ComicFury website. Should you choose to enable the features, people will also be able to rate and comment on your comic pages. The whole thing is pretty community driven, people read each others comics, you can subscribe to webcomics not unlike on youtube, there's a forum, etc. Of course a lot of people also use ComicFury as a means to an end, just as somewhere to put their webcomic without participating in the community.

Now that we got the basics down let's talk about what makes ComicFury special. First of all, ComicFury is non-profit, i.e. the goal of the site is not to earn money. This is the first thing that differentiates us from similar services. In that same spirit, ComicFury will not put up any advertisements on webcomics hosted, unless you choose to voluntarily enable them to support the site (they are disabled by default). The site strives to give you as much freedom and control over your content as possible. The sites you make with ComicFury are completely customizable, and thus, if you want to, they can be completely indistinguishable from any self-hosted webcomic.

I will admit that first I was a bit unsure what to talk about in relation to crowdfunding. ComicFury doesn't explicitly help you monetize your webcomic, since it's a very community-oriented site. It's all about sharing your art, and all that good stuff. There are ways to earn money with your ComicFury site, of course, but they are nothing special. You can put your own advertisements or a donation button on your webcomic pages, but that an article about crowdfunding does not make.

I came to a realization, however, that ComicFury, and as such all the webcomics created and hosted there, are crowdfunded. This never really occured to me until yesterday, but the fact is that the average ComicFury member does not earn the site any money. There is no ad-revenue, and thus no profit from gaining new members. However, as I've previously mentioned, people both have the ability to voluntarily enable ads on their own comics as well as donate to the site. A donation history can be found here, for those interested.

There's been lots of donations ever since the option was enabled, and a lot of people enabled the voluntary advertisements on their webcomics, with no strong encouragement from the site for either. This is something I personally think is really wonderful about the community. The amount of money gained from these two sources is almost enough to reimburse all the money ever put into ComicFury, retroactively. So as a comicfury member, you basically have the ability to crowdfund your own projects in addition to those of like-minded people by donating, choosing to display advertisements on your webcomic site, or even just by bringing in new members.

I guess the moral of the story is that though people were never forced to help the site earn a penny, they did. And thus a self-supporting non-profit yes-freedom webcomic host was born.

Hope you all enjoyed this post

-Kyo

Comments

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

It's really nice of you to post this, so people can learn more about how ComicFury works. I really enjoyed reading about it -- I didn't know about all those cool features.

>>I guess the moral of the story is that though people were never forced to help the site earn a penny, they did. And thus a self-supporting non-profit yes-freedom webcomic host was born. <<

This is one of the things that really excites me about crowdfunding. It gives people options. If you don't like the profit-driven corporate experience, you can pay attention and money to something else instead. Crowdfunding lets people create and support the kind of experience they want.