Episode 77: State of the Pipeline
It’s been a minute, as they say. So let’s catch up on what’s going on in the world of Pipeline these days. The State of the Pipeline is strong, of course, but let’s talk about the podcast’s cadence, what’s coming up on the website, and more.
Also: What does a job listing for a full time writer at a comic book website look like? We happen to have one to look at. I’m scared, starting with this bullet point from the job description: “Write at least 9, 450-500 word news stories per shift”.
I can barely publish one 2000 word article every week.
Learning French: I’m using DuoLingo for learning French. Let’s be friends! My ID there is AugieDB. My streak is now past 630 days! Mon vache habite a mon jardin!
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This job description sounds insane. How can anyone be expected to produce anything worth reading under these conditions is beyond me. Usually you know CBR pages these days are 99.9% garbage and the 0.01% that contains worthwhile info will be covered better elsewhere, on The Beat or even BC.
Ma vache habite dans mon jardin.
Yeah, it’s the final proof anyone should need that these sites are content farms now, and not really legitimate attempts at quality, long-lasting writing of any merit. It’s pump it out, dump it out, and then pump some more out. It’s a horrible hamster wheel race.When I wrote for CBR, we were rarely first on any given story, but we always went the extra mile to get a quote from someone or two get the whole story before printing it. Today, it’s a race to be “first” and “exclusive,” both of which are ultimately meaningless.
My question is, who clicks on these any more ? Are these even worth hosting costs at all ?
It’s been awhile since I was privy to ANY behind the scenes stuff on this all, and the market has surely changed since then, but these sites still get millions of clicks a month. MILLIONS. It’s all a race to get the news first or to get the clickbait-iest headline to drag people in. It’s all optimized for TODAY and NOW, not the long term. You’re right — likely 90% of the content on these sites is ignored on a monthly basis. The top 2% of the articles get 80% of the hits. And the long tail is in the other 18%. It’s useful to me sometimes when I’m researching the history of an event or a story, but I’m an outlier.
It’s all about the hit counts and the ad impressions.
Makes sense.
Although I’d be curious to know which of those pages get the clicks and why.
I can almost guarantee it’s NOT the comics information. There just isn’t a big enough audience for it. The large numbers come in looking for information on the tv shows and movies. Video games, too, I suspect. Comics books are far too small a market to get the big numbers, with the occasional exception during some huge breaking news.