New site gives Internet creatives the hope of a regular paycheck

New site gives Internet creatives the hope of a regular paycheck

Dec 17th 2013, 19:55, by Casey Johnston

Two custom posters that SMBC creator Zach Weinersmith plans to ship to patrons after crossing the $4,000/month mark.

Getting paid on the Internet, a place where many people only recently became OK with putting their credit card numbers, is no easy task. This is especially true for independent artists and creators. Zach Weinersmith, creator of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), is particularly tired of the ebb and flow of advertising dollars, not to mention the quality of ads on his site. Luckily, he’s found a new hope in Patreon, a funding site that lets his fans pay him on a subscription basis.
“[Ads] are a stressful way to make your living,” Weinersmith told Ars. Ads are volatile—January’s ad sales might be “20 to 30 percent of what I made in December,” Weinersmith says. While his site might serve 1.5 million ads in a day, he doesn’t have complete quality control over the types of ads. He’d love to take money from sites peddling Russian brides, he says, but the quality hit is palpable.
Not only are ads stressful, but they’re increasingly ineffective, Weinersmith says. Approximately 30 percent of his audience, which he says skews tech-savvy, block his ads completely, according to discrepancies from what his advertising partners report and what his own site analytics show.