One thing I have noticed in reading the issues from the 1970's into the 1980's is that the adds just aren't there today. The novelty adds, the back issue adds, the toys... just sort of faded away.  Anyone know how much of a hit this caused financially?

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  • Comic books cost between three and five dollars today. Put some advertising back and start printing on newsprint again that would change.
  • They stopped running ads other than in-house because interest dried up. Maybe there's an opportunity to increase that now that comics have become more mainstream. Printing on newsprint wouldn't help at all, sensible though that seems. It's been analyzed very carefully: Google it.

  • Those adds were such a staple for so long though, it must have been an end of an era when they finally stopped them.

  • Even so, if vinyl records can make a comeback, so can newsprint (for nostalgias sake). 

    Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod) said:

    They stopped running ads other than in-house because interest dried up. Maybe there's an opportunity to increase that now that comics have become more mainstream. Printing on newsprint wouldn't help at all, sensible though that seems. It's been analyzed very carefully: Google it.

  • I don' think so, even if they were to be printed on newsprint I think the era of affordable comics -relatively speaking- is long since past.  No comic book store could exist if comics were still a dollar, let alone .25 cents. The newsstands that supported the lower price comics are gone.  I think getting adds in might help but what can you advertise that isn't more easily available on the web?  

  • I don't understand this discussion.  Comics still have ads.  I grabbed a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #9 from my nightstand and checked.  It came out in March of this year.  There are a few house ads, but there also ads for a T-shirt company, Midtown Comics, the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, and the Lego Avengers game.  They are all comic related (Deadpool is on the T-shirts) but I'm sure this is all ad revenue for Marvel.  There's also an ad for ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and one for Marvel shows on Disney XD.  Maybe these are house ads, but I think it's possible these networks had to pay Marvel something.

    Plus, newsstands didn't "support" lower price comics.  Whatever newsstands and the like didn't sell, they could return.  Comic shops don't have that option.  And newsstands booted comics because they made so little profit for them.

    And sure, I wish comics were cheaper too.  But I'm glad creators can make a decent living doing them.

  • Comics used to have more ads, I must assume, among other reasons because they had a lot more readers. 

    But I think there is also the matter of how many alternative and more targeted advertisement avenues exist now.  It probably does not help that the comics themselves have become more targeted to an extent - I just can't picture Hellblazer running ads for kid toys or those odd little shrimp creatures or whatever.

    Even if that could be changed, I don't know that we would want to.  What happens if the advertisers don't like the editorial policy of a book?  That could harm creative freedom.


    Some form of digital plataform with targeted advertisement support might conceivably develop, if it did not already.  But I fear that is not very reminescent of those good old newsprint pieces of the 1930s to 1980s.

  • For awhile in the 70s there were more ad pages than comic pages, 17 ads versus 15 story pages. But most of those were ads for other comics. Just how much revenue did putting ads for their own products make Marvel? Seems people buying Fantastic Four and Spider-Man were already likely to pick up other Marvels they saw on the shelves. Remember those checklists that ran for awhile listing all forty something comics being printed, with a free comic if you bought a certain number (with warnings that a few more expensive titles like Planet of the Apes Magazine and Marvel Treasury Edition didn't qualify for the freebie)? And what happened if you bought Weird Wonder Tales and it was immediately cancelled?

  •  Yes, those adds are there, but adds like these aren't.

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    1936800048?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024and I don't mind comic creators making a decent living, though I wish I could afford to support them by buying more than one comic per month.  I'm just wondering if the disappearance of adds like these had something to do with the rise in prices.

    John Dunbar (the mod of maple) said:

    I don't understand this discussion.  Comics still have ads.  I grabbed a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #9 from my nightstand and checked.  It came out in March of this year.  There are a few house ads, but there also ads for a T-shirt company, Midtown Comics, the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, and the Lego Avengers game.  They are all comic related (Deadpool is on the T-shirts) but I'm sure this is all ad revenue for Marvel.  There's also an ad for ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and one for Marvel shows on Disney XD.  Maybe these are house ads, but I think it's possible these networks had to pay Marvel something.

    Plus, newsstands didn't "support" lower price comics.  Whatever newsstands and the like didn't sell, they could return.  Comic shops don't have that option.  And newsstands booted comics because they made so little profit for them.

    And sure, I wish comics were cheaper too.  But I'm glad creators can make a decent living doing them.

  • Readers used to write in "Can't you just put all the ads in the back of the book so they don't break up the stories?" And the editors had to nicely explain that advertising doesn't work that way, and that these businesses paid extra for right-hand pages and wanted to appear in the middle of the creative material.

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