Very interesting article about the decision of the Duluth News Tribune to cancel Blondie (after 76 years!).
Beyond the fact that I absolutely hate the way syndicates keep old cartoon strips alive long after their creator has died (for multiple reasons), I found it interesting to see what the actual money is that different cartoons cost the paper. 12 bucks for Beetle Bailey. 32 bucks for Hi and Lois. That's for the Sunday strip. Which, for Beetle Bailey, comes out to 600 bucks a year. Assuming the cartoonist gets half, that means 300 dollars a year. So for the cartoonist's take to get to $25K means on the order of 100 papers. Which all supports the perception that a newspaper cartoonist needs to have a circulation of at least a few hundred papers to actually make an independent living at it. I'd always had the suspicion that the toons cost the papers 10 to 20 bucks but it's nice to finally have independent confirmation.
You could sell licenses to use one cartoon/per week on one’s blogsite. for the amount of 300/600 bucks a year. Blog’s are 21st century newspapers anyways.
Jos
It’s the “sell” part that’s the problem. The general thought is that the internet is free and content is there for the taking.
To which the appropriate response is, “Jeez Louis!”
Daily Ink has Blondie. You can buy a subscription to that and dozens of other strips for $12 a year (but don’t quote me). That’s total not each. Cheaper than a newspaper subscription too. What they don’t have you can probably find online for free. So King Features isn’t doing anyone any favors by pricing their strips out of the market. The comics page is becoming obsolete except to get new customers. Most businesses would rather negotiate a lower price than to lose a customer. I got the impression that if KS dropped the price, DNT would have kept Blondie. Now their money is going to another company.