King Features Creates Digital Funny Pages
It’s been seven decades since Popeye the Sailor became a silver screen star and now he’s found a new niche in cyberspace.
King Features Syndicate is putting Popeye on the PC screen, along with Spiderman, Dennis the Menace, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Beetle Bailey, those Katzenjammer Kids, and Zippy the Pinhead, among other comic strip classics in a Comics Kingdom aimed at extending its brand and local newspaper brands through a digital marketing play.
King Features’s King Digital division debuted the daily digital incarnations of more than 60 of its comic strips this week with the Albany Times-Union, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Daily Oklahoman to draw an online audience to the funnies and create a new revenue stream for itself and its client newspapers. Comics Kingdom ran as a six-month beta test with the Times-Union prior to its official premiere, with major market newspapers to join the digital comics initiative in the next several weeks.
The comic’s package will be customized for each publication, with a 30-day archive that will include some 1,500 comic strips available for readers’ amusement and marketers’ ads.
The comic’s king figures to build a broad audience, but is targeting millennials and other young readers who may not be print readers.
“The demographic here is all over the place. It’s everybody,” said King Features spokeswoman Claudia Smith. “Of course we’re looking for a younger audience because that’s an audience newspapers are looking for.”
Results of the Times-Union beta test indicates the new comic concept will draw lots of chuckles and moolah: traffic to the comics section nearly doubled, prompting more than 11 page views for each visitor, who spent an average of five minutes reading the funny pages, producing an 86% jump in ad inventory.
Information about King Features’ new digital play.
