Building a Cartoon Entertainment Website for Fun and Profit

Part One — A Brief Overview (cont.)

Selling Your Cartoon

Initial approaches to making money with a cartoon website would include:

• Putting some new content on the website at regular intervals (such as once a week) for free, to attract and maintain an audience, and hoping to sell character merchandising such as T-shirts, coffee mugs or high quality prints of the cartoons.

• Putting only excerpts of a larger work on the internet, as a sort of preview to entice people to purchase the larger work on a CD or DVD, or in some format of digitally downloading the larger work for a fee.

• Putting teasers on the internet as inducements for private donors or investors (not Hollywood) to raise financing to produce a larger work. (Dealing with Hollywood is a whole different problem, to be discussed in Part Four.)

Later down the road, when one’s website is consistently attracting a substantial number of viewers, one can begin accepting money for allowing advertisers to post small ads on the home page. And at several hundred thousand views a month — but that will probably be far down the road indeed — one can expect to collect a few thousand dollars a month (total) for a bunch of small ads from various advertisers on the home page. And if one creates and posts cartoon animation or video on YouTube and the number of views reaches about 100,000 per month, YouTube will position advertisers with you and pay you half the advertisers’ fees. These are just two of several possibilities once a cartoon website has reached a significantly large audience — but for most of us, that will be quite a ways down the road and therefore a topic for Part Four. Getting started initially will probably be much more of a struggle.

The focus of this article will be from the view of someone who is initially unknown to the public. Some amateurs have had fun starting websites as a sort of hobby, to post their very amateur drawings and stories, and over time the uniqueness of their subjects have attracted viewers; as the quality of drawing slowly improved and the number of viewers slowly grew, the websites have been evolving into something significant, so that is one approach that can work. On the other hand, some of these young amateurs were quite savvy technological geeks who could build their own websites, something that I have no expertise in. So my article here is aimed more at the rest of you who, like myself, may be as technologically lost as I am. Locating the right people to help build one’s website for a reasonable price can be very difficult, but will be described thoroughly in Part Two.