King Features mixes cash with laughs in Comics Kingdom
NEW YORK -- Hearst-owned King Features hopes to give comic-strip fans and newspaper publishers a reason to smile Tuesday when it unveils what it calls the most ambitious effort yet to turn "the funnies" into a revenue-generating attraction for newspaper websites.
One of the largest comics syndicators — which has Blondie, Zits, Beetle Bailey, Baby Blues, Hägar the Horrible and Mutts among the 10 most widely sold strips — will introduce Comics Kingdom, a digital platform that newspapers can embed on their sites.
The goal is to display at least 60 strips next to local and national ads on newspaper-owned properties, and eventually to include animated video.
"On the print side in daily newspapers, the comics are so tight you don't see a lot of advertising adjacencies," says King Features Syndicate President T.R. "Rocky" Shepard. "Comics Kingdom is a solution to some of the challenges that newspaper companies are facing today."
Comics sales have suffered as papers have closed or shrunk, and as competition has grown from self-published Internet strips, known as webcomics.
King and rivals including Andrews McMeel Universal, Creators Syndicate, Tribune Media Services and United Feature have tried to boost online sales and take advantage of the Internet's capability to deliver video, audio and interactivity.
"As readership declines in newspapers, you have to develop an audience elsewhere," says Rob Fassino, who oversees interactive ventures for United.
Several have created their own websites and sold strips to newspapers' digital competitors.
"Our job is to represent the (comics) creators and find the largest possible audience," says Douglas Edwards, CEO of Universal's Uclick, which runs GoComics.com and sells strips to Google.
But King executives say Comics Kingdom will do fine by serving their biggest clients.
"We built our business model around supporting the newspaper and we're doing that on the online world as well," says John Soppe, King's digital managing director.
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