Announcement-2

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Announcement

Title text: I visualize a bunch of people sighing before they read this, thinking at last SMBC has literally just become a wall of text.

Votey

Explanation

This explanation is either missing or incomplete.

Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts describe what happens in each panel — here are some good examples to get you started (1) (2).

[Describe panel here]

Hey everyone, it's zach.

You may have noticed the site has changed a bit today. Specifically, the ads are gone and we no longer have any professional affiliations with a company called hiveworks.

After years of working together, we've decided to part ways. We wish them well.

In the short term, that means right this second I have no ads on the site. Please seize the opportunity to go nuts pressing the random button (or just the "x" key) and enjoy your ad-free experience as if it were some nice thing I did on purpose.

You may be saying to yourself "maybe I should support zach by buying something because he was nice and made the site ad-free on purpose." unfortunately, the store was also run by hiveworks and it'll take some time to switch over. I'm hopeful to get it operational in some form within a week or two. In the meantime, if you want to help, we do have a patreon, and my most recent books, bea wolf and a city on mars, can be bought at regular bookstores and online.

I haven't personally run this site in over a decade, and I feel a bit like I'm stepping into a racecar after having thought I was permanently retired from competition. If there are some bugs in the next month, please bear with me as we work it out.

Speaking of which, here's the fun part: My hope is to take this opportunity to make some improvements that've been needed for a while.

You've likely noticed smbc's ads have gotten way more annoying over time. You hate them. I hate them. The obnoxiousness is part of a broader internet trend where artists do the same amount of work but we get paid less and less. In short, more and more consumption is now on instagram, reddit, facebook, et cetera, where most of the ad revenue is captured by their network.

The result is that artists (and journalists, and recipe-makers, and pretty much everyone with their own homepage) have to run worse ads just to tread water on revenue, which simply drives more people to the social media sites we're already losing to. If you've ever wondered why so many sites have gotten so many annoying ads lately, this is a major part of the picture.

I'm hoping there's a better way.

As I bring the site back under my control, I may have to bring back annoying ads for a while, but we'r going to experiment with ways to make the site more accessible while making sure the business remains profitable.

Some ideas we're kicking around include: (a) trying to increase traffic simply by having ads that suck less, (b) putting more attention on patreon, (c) posting book reviews with bookshop.Org affiliate links (frankly, I want to do this anyway), and (d) finally adding all the merch to the store that a lot of you have requested over the years.

Meantime, please enjoy the site and, if you like, send a friend a comic that made you laugh or smile or think. Or feel existential despair.

I've had this career for 20 years now. There has been more than one tough passage, but I've always appreciated how many of you have come along, and been willing to support a comic that has changed so much over time, which is never designed to be viral, and which was never well-adapted for newspapers, books, or social media.

So, if you've made it all the way to the end here, let me just say thanks for letting me spend my life making this sort of work.

May it continue this for many years.

<3

Caption: Zach

Votey Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts describe what happens in each panel — here are some good examples to get you started (1) (2).

[Describe panel here]

Thanks

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