Brick and mortar stores for every industry are disappearing. Online shops are taking their place.
And as you mentioned in regard to comics, there are more new, online comic shops than the number of shops lost at the brick-and-mortar level.
The hobby is growing.
Comic shops can thrive as brick and mortar. The problem is a lot of people who open up shops are not good business people.
This applies to online shops too. So many come and go… all the time!
Yes, with more speculators, not more overall people I think. 2013, CHU was one of the very few websites dedicated to speculation. No one was doing youtube videos or pushing groups on facebook and social media. Now like online shops, you can spit and hit a new spec group.
So is the hobby growing? Maybe. But is it growing in a way that benefits everyone involved? Not so much.
Is floppies and comics going away anytime soon? Never. But I don’t think it’s going to be the same moving forward unless we get a lot more people reading, doing general collecting and not just speculating on them as commodities and sit and maybe enjoy them what they’re intended to be originally.
I dont think speculators are necessarily a bad thing to have. The difference between now and the 90s is the overall quality of comics. It is much higher now, especially in the indie realm.
I never said they’re bad either, I think when they’re pushing the numbers on books that see numbers they normally wouldn’t see is not overall healthy either.
Ya bragging about stuff like that is dumb, I agree.
The maturity of social media, YouTube, etc., since 2013 is also true of every industry.
These are all signs of a growing hobby. If there wasn’t demand for the content on social media or YouTube, it wouldn’t exist.
How do you identify “demand”? Artificially making content and viewers watch it doesn’t mean it is in demand. I have watched countless hours of cow hooves being cleaned for some damn reason…I wasn’t demanding it.
I don’t think it is growing. Who knows how those production units are calculated; unless you are the one making them, then they are being made up. Movies have created interest for publishers to increase volume, but that doesn’t make anything in demand.
Exactly, when a speculator buys up 1k copies of a comic they think they’re gonna be able to sell for double their money now or later isn’t “true” demand…
Or the retailer who bought 1000 copies of BRZRKR #1 so they can get that fancy 1:1000 ratio variant is not demand…
I’ve watched Comictoms subscribers increase 5-FOLD in the last 18 months.
@agentpoyo what percentage increase for individual visits has CHU experienced in the same timeframe?
I would imagine it’s huge.
He’s a poor choice to use I think… ComicTom is a snake oil salesman…
The main site is dipping and trending downwards now while the forums are consistently growing but the number of active users (logged in and commenting) is about the same since 2019 when the pandemic started, the middle of 2019 is when the forums started to take off and I’d imagine a lot of this new traffic is due to more people working remote with more flexibility from day jobs, etc.
That doesn’t answer the question. What percentage increase for individual visits has CHU experienced in the same timeframe?
Sorry, mean forums peaked in 2020 during pandemic. Since that time, they’ve stayed pretty consistent. Here’s the graph for users per day:
Slightly went up in 2021 but leveled off and down a bit, but then slightly increased. But overall, pretty consistent.
I used to work at JC Penney and like their products. Every comment you make today is insulting things I like, lol!
I’m not changing your bathroom bucket in the basement this week as punishment.
That’s awesome. I’m happy for you guys.
You’ve had over a 5-Fold increase too. And incredibly consistent too.
