Recently I read an article about the web-comic The Oatmeal. Three things I found most interesting: Matthew Inman, the creator, realizes income in the 6 figures from this web-comic, his following numbers in the millions, and he uses his standing in the web community to fund worthy projects. Oh, and he very slickly handled a company that stole his content. Matthew talks about the magazine article in his blog, The State of the Oatmeal, February 2013 edition. Here's his picture from the article.
About the stealing content episode, here's a quote from the magazine article:
A while back Matthew published the comic "Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived." In case you didn't know, a whole subculture is also centered on Nikola Tesla, as noted in the Wikipedia article on him:
After learning about a group trying to preserve Tesla's abandoned lab in New York, Matthew mounted a campaign to help raise money. He raised $1 million dollars in less than 2 weeks.
Matthew has moved on to other projects, check his blog for info. Currently he's trying to secure a space at the San Diego Comicon, July 12th - 15th.
-- Marge
About the stealing content episode, here's a quote from the magazine article:
Part of the challenge of creating content online is maintaining credit for the work. Web comics are shared freely, thrown in with the endless stream of images people post on social networks. It can be great marketing, but comics often appear without any link to the source. "I'm not going to try to police everyone," Inman says. "The Internet's changed how intellectual property works, and you just have to learn to let it go."Note: If you don't subscribe to Time, you won't able to access the article.
But not always. In 2011, Inman accused the aggregation site FunnyJunk of posting hundreds of his comics without attribution. The images soon disappeared, but Inman received a letter from the site's lawyer requesting $20,000 in damages for defamation. In a lengthy response on the Oatmeal, Inman said he was going to raise $20,000, send FunnyJunk a photo of the money and a drawing of FunnyJunk's owner's mother "seducing a Kodiak bear," and then give the cash to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. "Operation Bear Love Good, Cancer Bad," as he called it, raised more than $200,000 through the crowdfunding charity site Indiegogo. Inman sent the photo, FunnyJunk dropped its legal claims, and Oatmeal fans proved their willingness to throw around thousands of dollars just to make a point.
A while back Matthew published the comic "Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived." In case you didn't know, a whole subculture is also centered on Nikola Tesla, as noted in the Wikipedia article on him:
...His work and reputed inventions are also at the center of many conspiracy theories and have also been used to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories and New Age occultism.
After learning about a group trying to preserve Tesla's abandoned lab in New York, Matthew mounted a campaign to help raise money. He raised $1 million dollars in less than 2 weeks.
Matthew has moved on to other projects, check his blog for info. Currently he's trying to secure a space at the San Diego Comicon, July 12th - 15th.
-- Marge
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