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readwebcomicsgdi · 9 months ago
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You keep saying "Build a website" but doesn't that cost money?
It does! Like basically any other profession or hobby there are expenses eventually, and hosting is just another one like the tablet or the bristol board.
Generally my advice is to start out hosting somewhere free like ComicFury, both to see how well you actually like maintaining a long term project and how seriously you want to take it. If it turns out it's important enough to you that you want to turn it into a career or ensure its stability, you find a way to sustain it. In my case, I hosted Kidd Commander on tumblr for the first fifty pages or so, realized how unstable that was and how much it would upset me if they changed their content policies or functionality in ways that would harm my comic (which they have, several times), and started making efforts to drum up enough support to maintain its own site. Every person running a website of any kind went through some form of this process at some point!
If you give it a shot and find you DON'T really care to dump resources into it, if it isn't that big of a deal to you if it goes down with a company's ship one day, then it's probably not worth the trouble or the money! Websites are a lot of work and resources, and while in my opinion it's a good trade not everyone would agree. Maybe you have other places you need to put your money or your time, you have other things that take priority that means you don't elect to drop money on something that's more like a hobby, that's fine. This isn't like, backhanded either; not everyone DOES want to fool with all this, and even if you're into making comics that doesn't mean you also have strong enough feelings about longevity or ownership to want to put in the effort to own your own space.
Whether it's something you want to carve out for yourself is up to you, I can't help y'all with that. A lot of my aim when I bring up hosting is to remind people about the inherent risk they're taking by relying entirely on corporations to house these passion projects that are long term and, frequently, unattractive to the shareholders who will probably gain influence over the corporation during the course of the work. The internet is aggressively centralized, to the point a lot of people have gotten so comfortable with apps and for-profit social media that they trust them with a lot more than they should and aren't even aware there are other options. If it's free, you're the product, and as soon as you stop being profitable they will sweep up everything you've built and send you out empty handed. If that's not alarming to you, by all means set up shop somewhere like Webtoon. Really! But if it is, figure out what your goals are and get to work.
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