WOWIO

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Fri Nov 23, 2007 2:24 am

Having done a couple of articles on micropayments a few months ago, I was interested to see a new service called WOWIO show up. Basically, they allow people to download free ebooks (of comics as well as other things) and then pay the owner.

So... Where's the money in this?, I wondered. There's no adverts on the site. Perhaps there are in the ebooks but advertising is a poor market model which works only occassionally.

Has anyone tried it? (As a user or author.) Anyone know a bit more about how it works? I can't do anything with it since it's US only just now.

- Joel Fagin

Kris X · Post by **Kris X** » Fri Nov 23, 2007 2:30 am

All I know is they were at Comic Con 2006. They handed out one-pager comics.... I didn't quite follow what they were doing aside from online comic things.

Komiyan · Post by **Komiyan** » Fri Nov 23, 2007 3:05 am

I was going to, as it's worked out very well for Keenspot, but they only deal with mainland US customers, so I figured they probably won't deal with non-US cartoonists.

The money is in the downloads themselves- there are adverts in the actual downloaded books.

Starline · Post by **Starline** » Fri Nov 23, 2007 9:28 am

They have major sponsors like Verison and EA. If you download a pdf, the first page will say "This Ebook is brought to you by COMPANY" and the last page will say the same. So that's where the money comes from.

If errr.... anyone would like to see an example, you can download my comic... http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=2408

Komiyan wrote:I was going to, as it's worked out very well for Keenspot, but they only deal with mainland US customers, so I figured they probably won't deal with non-US cartoonists.

The money is in the downloads themselves- there are adverts in the actual downloaded books.

They do work with Non-US artist from what I've heard. They had to set up something for the Penny and Aggie team because Gisele lives in Canada. And I think the same goes for the artist of Clan of the Cats. It doesn't hurt to ask.

Mvmarcz · Post by **Mvmarcz** » Fri Nov 23, 2007 9:00 pm

last I checked Inverloch had them and she's not in the US it's just you can't GET them unless you live in the US...which is weird since it's all download but it must have something to do with the advertising >_>

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Sat Nov 24, 2007 1:27 am

Thanks, Starline. I was going to email you if no one could help me here. Best of both worlds.

mvmarcz wrote:last I checked Inverloch had them and she's not in the US it's just you can't GET them unless you live in the US...which is weird since it's all download but it must have something to do with the advertising >_>

The website says it's because of copyright but they're working on it. They'd need local advertisers too, of course.

- Joel Fagin

Alternacomics · Post by **Alternacomics** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 6:11 am

Hey everyone, if you've got a few minutes please check out our graphic novels and comics at WOWIO! Just search for Alterna Comics in the Publisher menu here. And email us or go to our site, http://www.alternacomics.com, and let us know what you thought about them!

Thanks a lot we really appreciate it!

Chris Crosby · Post by **Chris Crosby** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 8:15 pm

WOWIO's been amazing for us so far. We received our first payment this month and it was eye-poppingly great.

Here's how I see it, in TV terms (as I see pretty much everything): running comics on a website is like first-run primetime, and putting the archives on WOWIO is like selling your show into syndication. You may get more viewers on the first run, but you make a heck of a lot more money in syndication.

And yes, WOWIO doesn't limit itself to U.S. publishers only. And hopefully they'll be expanding their userbase to other countries next year, as the service is growing by leaps and bounds.

Jackhass · Post by **Jackhass** » Thu Nov 29, 2007 3:03 am

Wow...this is actually a pretty excellent idea. Too bad about the US only thing...judging from my logs more than half of my readers ain't American.

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Thu Nov 29, 2007 4:45 am

Isn't wowio someone who really likes Japanese?

Post by **Kisai** » Fri Nov 30, 2007 11:50 am

This is actually not a bad idea, the only problem being that they are locked to the US which makes advertising them on primarily global systems significantly wasteful.

For example, UK, AU and CAnada visitors can not download them, and yet that's (hold on saving,, it's going to crash) ... ew the ip list for CG makes the text editor go into hundreds of MB's of ram.

I'll come back with a breakdown if I can find a tool to parse this.

C.w. · Post by **C.w.** » Fri Nov 30, 2007 12:48 pm

For my site, courtesy google analytics:

USA - 59.74%
Canada - 7.94%
UK - 6.62%
Sweden - 4.44%
Austria - 3.85%
Poland - 3.04%

And then "other" with the rest. While it might not make technical sense, with all the legal mumbo jumbo it makes a lot of sense to service the US first, then work on the rest.

I've seen ads for them, but never really been interested because of their website - as shallow as that sounds, i always got frustrated by the download system - having to input a credit card or scan my ID to download a book that i have to read on my computer is annoying. Maybe i'd be more inclined if i had an e-reader.