Overview
The Funnies is a paid newsletter that delivers five web comics to your inbox every day.
Why
I'm a huge web comic fan. I remember the days of flipping through the Sunday newspaper to get to the fully-colored comics section featuring greats like Garfield and Curtis and Pearls Before Swine. As I grew older, I continued discovering newer artists, but now I followed them digitally, largely through Instagram or Twitter.
The social platforms are amazing for amassing followers; some comic artists I follow have millions of fans! To support their work, the artists often set up Patreons, but only a tiny fraction of their following converts to paid subscribers.
In general, the value of the average web comic is low, not because the quality is low, but because comics compete with other forms of digital entertainment - memes, cat videos, funny gifs, etc. As such, the would-be subscriber is hesitant spending $1-$5/month on one artist because they don't get a lot of value back in return. In my research, a majority of people who subscribe to these artists do so as a form of selfless support.
But what if you could combine a bunch of these artists' work under one subscription? Add some curation and discovery to the mix and suddenly a monthly subscription might make more sense to a lot more people. The revenue brought in serves as an additional income stream to the partnering artists.
What
The Funnies partners with the best indie artists in the world, curating their work under one subscription so readers get access to the funniest comics from multiple artists for one price.
The comics are delivered either through email or an RSS feed. Users get a unique daily issue consisting of 5 random comics.
Artists are collectively paid 95% of the newsletter revenue.
How
The homepage is a statically-generated Nuxt.js SPA. Stripe is used to manage subscriptions. There is no signup or login for the user.
Every day a script runs to create a unique issue consisting of five, unseen comics for each user. The images themselves are not embedded inside the email; instead, the email sent out contains a unique link corresponding with each issue.
The link opens up the SPA which fetches the comic image URLs from the database. Comics are "delivered" in this manner for three main reasons. The first is that many of the comics are comprised of multiple images best viewed in carousel-format. It's impossible to display this type of view in an email.
The second reason is it's much easier to share URLs than emails. Standard Web Share APIs makes it cinch for anyone to share the entire issue or an individual comic with their friends/family on whatever communication platform they use. As you can see in the image below, users can easily share comics from their phone to any of their social channels.
The final reason for displaying comics in the browser instead of in email is to have the flexibility to enhance the user experience. For example, I want to give users the ability to specify what comics they like so as to personalize what comics they see.
2021
