The Number of Webcomics in the World
by Joey Manley
In a recent comment thread here at TAC, Chris Crosby said that Comic Genesis hosts 8,000 webcomics, and that DrunkDuck hosts 4,000 (I’m not sure where he got that latter number, but I believe him). On its homepage, SmackJeeves claims 4,000. I also believe them. WCN has about 2000 comics at this moment. So that’s 18,000 webcomics just on four free webcomics hosting services. That doesn’t count comics being run on invitation-only portals like Modern Tales, Keenspot, etc. There are also many comics being run on services like LiveJournal and Blogger. The most popular webcomics, of course, aren’t on any such services — and many people wish to emulate the success of the stars — so I’m guessing that there’s a very large number of additional comics on private domains. Any guesses as to how many comics there are out there, above and beyond the 18,000 we can identify and count quickly on the free hosting services? My impulse is just to double the number and say there are 36,000 webcomics, but I’d like to be able to back that up with evidence — not sure that such evidence is available, though. Thoughts?
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:45 pm
2,000 on WCN? REALLY? Shoot, I’d have never guessed. And I check out that “Updating Today” section every morning.
I once saw a claim on a wiki that there were 70,000 webcomics online, counting all of ‘em (updating, dead for years, abandoned, finished, “on hiatus,” etc). And the Wikipedia article claims there are 7,000, which seems really, really low.
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Yeah, Comic Genesis itself claims more than 7,000.
I rounded up a little on the 2,000 WCN comics. The actual number right now is 1757. Right before I launched WCN Free, there were about 600 comics on WCN. How long has that been now? A month or two?
January 3rd, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Comic Genesis itself claims more than 7,000
We’re including everything that updated for two weeks and then vanished, right?
January 3rd, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Wow, that is really amazing. From some thread I read somewhere I was under the impression that there were around 10,000 webcomics. Clearly there are a lot more. No wonder comicspace.com took off as fast as it did.
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:53 pm
True, ComicSpace.com took off, but don’t forget their nearly 10,000 member database is not only includes web cartoonists, but also print publishers and creators, syndicated comic strip creators, and fans who don’t actually create anything. It doesn’t give a good idea of how many of anything there really are.
January 4th, 2007 at 9:26 am
William — I recently walked through the process of signing up for a Comic Genesis account (not that I expect to use it — just wanted to see how it works), and according to the signup pages, if you don’t post at least three pages of a comic at some point, your account will be deleted. So that takes out a lot of the signups that don’t update, I’d guess.
January 4th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Update: since I posted comment # 2, about 24 hours ago, WCN has gained six more comics series. Just an interesting little tidbit.
January 4th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
There’s a lot of folks like me who own a domain and host friends and family as well as myself. I had 12 web comics running at one point. Now I have 4 regularly updating and 3 more starting soon. Online comics lists “5,772 online comics” which are hosted all over the place. Plus, I see bunches that are available in other languages only. How do you count those? Even if you stick to those in English it’s going to be very hard to pin down a total. 20,000 might be as defendable an estimate as 40,000.
As Pynchon says, “If you torture the numbers enough, they’ll tell you anything.”
January 5th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Hey Greg, who are the other two? (C∂ulhuvi∂a, coming this spring)
Sinister Bedfellows started on LiveJournal, jumped to ComicGenesis, is associated with Biscuit Press and redirects from SinisterBedfellows.com. How many am I?
January 6th, 2007 at 4:45 am
Why would it be harder to count webcomics in other languages? I can tell how many webcomics Mjuu is (one) even though it’s Norwegian.
mckenzee: I think Sinister Bedfellows is one webcomic.
January 6th, 2007 at 10:37 am
I think mkenzee’s point is that there’s overlap between the numbers we “know” — that is, some individual comics are in more than one place. So, for example, ROCR is on Comic Genesis and WCN and at rocr.net. How much overlap there is between Comic Genesis’ 8000, WCN’s 2000, SmackJeeves’ 4000, etc., is unknowable, so the 18,000 number is wobbly. But, then, we always knew that the 18,000 number didn’t begin to include all webcomics (Penny-Arcade, the biggest webcomic out there, isn’t counted in that 18,000 at all, for example, nor is MegaTokyo, Mac Hall, Applegeeks, PvP, or just about any webcomic that the average reader would name in the first dozen or so comics he or she would mention, if asked to mention a bunch of webcomics). So, yeah.
January 7th, 2007 at 10:17 am
I think pinning down an exact number would be difficult. You can purchase webhosting and a domain name for a year for under 100 dollars, not a very serious outlay of cash. On top of that so many comics just exist with little word of mouth or advertising. I think a portion of web comic are being made simply because they can be, where artists enjoy creating and don’t really worry about readership and popularity. Hell, in the last few months I stumbled on Dicebox and Templar Arizona, two amazing comics I had heard nothing about in the entire time they were being made.
January 10th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
One possible strategy would be to check a few indexes – TheWebcomicList.com and OnlineComics.net would probably be the best places, seeing that they’re the largest ones (and in this order; currently, TWCL has a bit under 8150 entries) – and then just plain count how many of the comics listed are from CG, DD, SJ & WCN respectivly. A bit of arithmetics would then yield 8 estimates to start from.
I did a small random sampling (all comics under a certain letter – “I”, IIRC) with TWCL x CG some time back (erly 2006 I think), and got a result of about 40K; but that could still be off by much. I’ve been using 50K as a likely and 100K as a certain upper bound.
I don’t think overlap is too big of an issue. The portal-swappers are a rather small, albeit apparently noisy minority. Also, with my proposed method, you’d only get dubbelhits for those webcomics that transferred from major portal A to major portal B; redirect sites and coming/going indie would not be reflected. It’d be *lots* of work, however, so I suspect we’re not going to see volunteers for this task anytime soon.
(BTW – has anyone compiled any sort of a list on “famous or semi-famous webcomics that started out on CG / Keenspace”?)
July 13th, 2007 at 6:12 am
[...] Esta definición tiene sentido cuando un caricaturista elije Internet como medio de difusión para su trabajo. Claro, hacia aca migra el público. Según Talkaboutcomics.com, hoy lectores y sponsors merodean Comicgenesis, Drunkduck, Smackjeeves, Webcomicsnation y Moderntales, ejemplos de portales .com dónde moran alrededor de 18 mil tiras. Y estas comunidades son sólo el palier de un edificio habitado, entre otros, por: Manga.clone-army, creaciones hilarantes con impronta dÅjinshi; Little-gamers, primos cÃnicos del premiado Penny-arcade; Americanelf, trivial e iluminado; Bobandgeorge, joya del subgénero sprite-comic. En definitiva, cientos de tÃtulos listados en Comixpedia, galardonados en Ccawards y curados por Webcomicsreview. [...]