Sexy Ads and Embarrassed Dads

Erika here! Remember back in December when I wrote about the conundrum Matt and I are puzzling out about our totally awesome and totally-too-graphic-for-a-lot-of-people ads? Here, it was this post: Worst Friend, Worst Wife, Worst #Content #Creator :D

Matt just whipped up this little update for you guys on the possible solution we found and also the challenges it brings. Enjoy!

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Hey Patreon Folks! Matt here to chat, or, I guess, bitch about bizness...

Here goes: Ads.

Adverts have been praying on my mind something fierce this past 6 months. We get a bunch of emails about them on OJST pretty often. Some people absolutely love that we have curated sexy banners - a lot of folk click on them - and others are turned away because of them. They are a polarizing subject for OJST readers.

I've always been a big believer in ad blockers. I don't mind them - I use them a bunch myself and I encourage people to make use of them. So I've always taken the stance of, well, we can have sexy pretty ads and if folks don't like them they can just go block them; no worries! Maybe they'll throw us a dollar or two on Patreon in exchange.

But it doesn't really cover the outliers: people who don't have blockers on their phones, the mum wanting to share a website with her kid, and me being too embarrassed to show the website to my Dad in person. That sort of thing.

I've been wanting to turn OJST into an Ad Free Zone.

But gosh, guys, it’s an expensive thought.

Right now - and it’s truly hard to guess at (I'll go into this more in a sec), but we make anywhere from $12-18k from ads a year, that's $230-350 per comic!

It’s hard to be specific. Other than direct ad sales, a lot of our in-house ads get us sign-up commissions and it’s hard to tell whether people sign up because of an ad or because of a comic review. I try my best to guess, but there's A LOT of wiggle room.

I'm so eternally grateful that we have Patreon and I'm absolutely not belittling the income we get from it. It keeps us going. It’s the core drive to what we do - I don't think we could make OJST without it. I also feel the same way about ALL our income revenues. The prospect of fundraising to replace the income we make from our ads just… does my head in. I don't want to put the burden of raising an extra $300 to get ad-free comics on our already amazing, supportive Patrons or Kickstarter backers. I also can't just say good bye to that income and take that hit personally.

The first half of the year is always crazy busy for us - we get production rolling on book stuff and it’s time-draining and emotionally exhausting. 

But later this year, my dream is to start emailing and maybe asking bigger companies if they want to help sponsor the site, like give them a text link where our ads ought to be, or something like that, in exchange for covering our ad income. At the same time we can make our education comics officially license-free for education purposes - something else we've been meaning to do (and do unofficially at the moment).

I truly think it would be a community action as well as PR one, and maybe somebody would be interested in that. I dunno. I hate to go begging people, or 'selling out' =/

Also, yeeesh, that'll mean more website tweaking, and that poor girl’s bones are looking awfully patchworked as it is.

I guess I’m NOT complaining. I’m just saying: I've got dreams for OJST. Ads are a time old internal debate for ALL webcomicers. It's in our blood, it’s integral webcomic-income, and well, to be frank, OJST is lucky in that we can successfully run adult ones. But as we slowly grow, and our collection of education comics gets bigger, I want to start looking at it less as a webcomic, and more as a public service.

And I just wanna show the site off to my dad...