Building a Cartoon Entertainment Website for Fun and Profit

Part One — A Brief Overview

Cartoons on the Internet

Present day Hollywood is an example of art controlled by rampant financial greed, and by crass executives who are not artists, resulting in stifled creativity that make sincere cartoon fans wish for a return to a time when artists were much more in control. That’s why creative artists today need the freedom of the Internet to reach their respective audiences, whether their preferred medium is comic strips or animated cartoon movies.

Today there are over two billion people surfing the internet, with more adding on all the time. It may have started mainly with young techies, but for the last several years millions of older people, up into retirement age, have become active on the net. This means that there are potentially large audiences of all age groups, with a wide range of interests. The trick, though, is to find the right individuals and make them aware of what you are offering, because to them each new website is like a lost grain of sand on a very large beach.

Today there are literally over a hundred million blogs and websites, so people are overwhelmed with choices. No matter how narrow a person’s interests there will be at least a few blogs or websites that cater specifically to those interests, so virtually everyone on the internet has narrowed down their choices to the few they want to visit, and they really don’t want to have to consider anything more. One would hope that people who like your website would tell their friends, so that word of mouth would make your audience grow. Years ago when there were far fewer websites, that used to happen, but today it rarely happens. So anybody starting a new website, no matter how good it is, has to really work at promoting it. Methods of promotion will be discussed in some detail in Part Three.

Commercial success on the internet, as anywhere else, begins with building an audience for a cartoon that has enough appeal to make at least some of the audience enthusiastic enough to want to buy either character merchandising or the cartoons themselves.