An AntiBunny Mood: Night Drive

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End of Project Wonderful

A sad day for all webcomic creators. Project Wonderful, through which the ads here are provided, just announced that they’re closing down. This is a loss of income to me and many other artists, and a loss to the webcomic community as a whole as it was also a means of discovery for artists and readers alike.

Unlike other advertisers Project Wonderful never collected user data, never tracked you, never served malware in ads, never used popups, pop unders, or audio ads.  They just provided the simplest of ads. A banner with one picture and a link to a website that had to be vetted before it could be displayed.  Anyone could participate as well.  No one was too small to display an ad on their website, or have their ad displayed somewhere. It was open and accessible for the little guy, and even the ads themselves were worth seeing because they were usually ads for other comics. I found some of my regular reads through PW.

With Project Wonderful everyone could support a webcomic just by showing up. Those days are gone now. A month from today the last ads will be taken down, and an era will end.  This means the only real sources of income for creators too small to reliably sell merchandise will be through crowdfunding sites like Project Wonderful, and Ko-Fi.

Now more than ever it’s important to support your artists. Contribute, even if it’s just a dollar per month to their Patreons, drop a tip in the tip jar, and share their work for others who can help out as well.  Project Wonderful was something amazing while it lasted, but they couldn’t survive in the increasingly cutthroat world of online advertising, and with their departure the ability for readers to passively support creators has vanished. A lot of artists now have to choose between wrestling one another for an ever diminishing slice of the crowdfunding pie or turning to those more cutthroat advertisers.