In a few weeks the final issue of Viz Media’s “Shonen Jump” will be published and sent to stores. There will be no more issues printed after this. The reason for this is because Viz wants to launch a new product called “Shonen Jump Alpha,” which will be the same basic premise but with a few major differences. The first is that it will be weekly as opposed to monthly. This is a good thing as it’s what Viz has been aiming for all this time: A weekly manga anthology. The second is that it will jump ahead with current series to their latest chapters in Japan (or close enough). Finally (and here’s the big one) it will be all digital.
That’s right folks: Viz is eliminating the paper element for “Shonen Jump Alpha!” The magazine is now being tailor made for iPads, Kindle Fires, and pretty much every other tablet device out there. Is this the future? Maybe. All signs point to tablets being a much bigger force in the industry if they don’t lose their hold on the market. Is it good to focus solely on the tablet market and ignore the faithful magazine market all together? That’s a little bit tougher to answer. See, I have no problem with companies experimenting with digital comics. I seriously don’t. My problem is when they look at the lower costs of online comics (AKA: Nothing) and decide to go full force with it on that basis alone.
It sounds good on paper that you can sell comics without printing them on paper. You can eliminate the costs of materials, close book processing plants, and you can just store things on hardware. Truthfully, you can even eliminate some jobs by doing this because it takes people to box and ship merchandise. So yes, you DO save a lot of money by doing this! Here’s my concern: I don’t think the tablet market is big enough to justify eliminating the paper magazine. The magazine has been very successful and consistently profitable for years. That’s because people like the idea of getting roughly 4,000 pages worth of manga entertainment for $30 a year.
That’s a great deal and it’s delivered to your doorstep. Now Viz wants to cut that out. They want to deliver it wirelessly to a tablet or smart phone. And for saving them all this money the magazine will even go weekly. But how many people are actually going to do this? DC Comics and Marvel have been experimenting with digital distribution for a while now, and while the profits are good enough to justify continuing working with these new models (well, it costs nothing, so how can they not?), the comics still sell enough to keep the paper comics in circulation. Part of this is because comic fans are largely made of collectors and thus are more willing to pay for something they can hold.
The other part is that while tablets and smart phones are catching on, not everyone feels they are convenient for long books. It’s one thing to check up movie times on your phone and text a friend. It’s something entirely different to read a comic or book on your phone for hours while you tap the screen to flip the pages (not to mention the battery life this drains). iPads are much easier in this regard, but the market is small enough that the iPad market couldn’t be the main source of income for a comic book company even if every person who owned one read comics on them.
Finally, advertisers tend to pay more money for ads in magazines because people pay more attention to them. Because there’s no “space” on a digital comic’s page, the ads that do appear cost advertisers much less money than taking a page or two out of a magazine. So in terms of advertising (which is where the bulk of the money is made I hate to say) magazines and paperback comics are still WAY more profitable!
And Viz wants to eliminate this because they’re confident switching the magazine to online only will make more money?
I hate to say it, but though it will bring in some money, it’s WAAYYYY too early to think it will replace the magazine and pull in the same numbers! A much better way to do this would have been to make Shonen Jump Alpha an extra bonus for subscribers and keep the magazine around for a few months to see if anyone would really use it in the first place. A couple of the series would be different (to give magazine readers a reason to go to the site), but otherwise you could ease everyone into the new model rather than jumping from a perfectly working ship and expect everyone to do the same.
My concern is that it’s too early to be making the jump. People are used to Shonen Jump as a magazine. There’s no guarantee that all those people will jump to the new format when there was a format that was (and is) working for them. I also want to point out that the small percentage of people who DO read their comics online do so because they steal them! I have yet to meet someone who solely buys comics digital. Truthfully, I don’t know ANYONE who buys their comics digitally! The only digital comics I read are the archived comics that come with a subscription to the paper release.
Shonen Jump Alpha is obviously the much cheaper route for Viz to go and that’s the main reason they’re doing this. That said, I think the potential amount of people they’re going to lose altogether from this abrupt transition is going to outweigh any savings they’re going to have. It just doesn’t make sense to completely drop the magazine that DOES make money for something that’s untested, unproven, and potentially polarizing to the very people you want to sell your content to! Cheap or not, if there’s no market for it then there’s no money to be made. I could be wrong, but I personally will not be making the jump over to Shonen Jump Alpha because I don’t have an iPad and reading comics on a computer screen is a hassle.
But what about you readers? Are you going to drop Shonen Jump because of the new format or give Shonen Jump Alpha a good chance?
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