Hosting is cheap and there is free hosting available if you don’t care about having a custom domain and have a limited audience. If your audience is big enough to go past that bandwidth you can probably monetize somehow and cover server costs easily, even if it’s just selling a few pieces of merch. My website is $80 a year with a custom domain and I get unlimited transfer/bandwidth. It’s shared hosting so over about 1k visitors per day means it’ll get slow but if you’re getting that kind of traffic you can probably sell more merch and get a vps

Use twitter/pixiv/ig for promotion but if you don’t do the above your locking out anyone who refuses to make account. All of them won’t let you look at more than 1-5 images before locking you out entirely with account nag screens that can’t be bypassed. Or just stay on those platforms, I don’t care, I’ll just never read your comic

Yeah like $10 a month for a comic.

No, it really, seriously, doesn’t. People that rely on social media are just lazy and ignorant.

And it gives you some degree of control over reposts and people stealing content. If your not on the platform you cant really contest claims against a video or post.

Plenty of ways to host for free, even with a custom domain. (Though the domain is $15 per year) Like GitHub. Or you can even just use Tumblr with a custom domain.

If they don’t want their comics browsed that’s their choice of course but it seems pretty silly. What if instagram deleted/bans their account for nonsense? Goodbye audience and archive of everything you’ve ever done

Used to be you got a free webhosting account and posted comics to a gallery on a shitty handmade webpage until you built up an audience or gave up. If you got bigger you’d move to a better site with a custom domain and new readers could catch up if they were interested. Achewood, gunshow, dinosaur comics, questionable content, xkcd, penny arcade, nedroid, etc all started about this way and many of them continue to this day. Use social media for promotion, not for archival

My guess is they don’t want to bother with people who aren’t willing to fuck with facebook, twitter, pixiv, etc. or they don’t know how to make a free website. Whatever, just means they lose the audience of people who refuse to use facebooks bullshit

Used to be, you got one comic with the sunday paper. There was no bingeing your favorite comics you just waited until they came out.

I mean, this is true if "used to be" means "prior to WWII" (or maybe even earlier). Publishers have been putting out collections of comic strips in book form for a very long time - I grew up in the '70s reading Pogo compendiums published in the 1960s.

that’s why the internet fucking sucks now. Everyone’s too afraid to make their own site and lazily relies on the conglomerates of social media, which has reduced the internet into like 5 websites that repost each others content

Also seeing isn’t converted to income, especially on instagram. The more hardcore comic fans may want to see your work in full, may want to follow the story if there’s a narrative to your comic, see your arts evolution, etc. and they’re probably the ones that are far more likely to drop cash on merch for a series they enjoy. That’s why you combine the approaches, post comics on instagram or whatever to get the word out, and have a site so your hardcore fans can easily browse your work (with the added bonus of letting people who don’t fuck with social media also see it)

Again, or don’t, I don’t care. Post everything to facebook and twitter, make the internet just 2 websites instead of 5, refuse to have control of the primary platform your work is shared on, whatever