Chewing Pencils

Hopefully you’ve read this post on the next wave of cartoon troubles caused by our Danish friends. I don’t want to comment on whether they are right or wrong or get embroiled in another free-speech argument. But I do want to reflect briefly on the opportunity this presents for cartoonists.

When the original furore erupted, many people were interested in what was causing all the fuss. They wanted to see the cartoons to decide for themsleves how offensive they were. Needless to say, the internet was the first port of call, and a number of brave souls across the web had published the images for the world to see.

Like many other cartoonists with web sites and blogs, I noticed a dramatic increase in web traffic for a couple of weeks. When I placed a comment on the Danish controversy on my other blog, the traffic went through the roof - and the blog entry was even quoted in the New York Times. While the traffic has receeded in the time since, it still remains above what it was before the Danish thing.

This is the sort of exposure that is a rare bonus for cartoonists. With literally millions of people searching for ‘cartoons’ or ‘Danish cartoons’ or ‘cartoons of Mohammad’ there’s a good chance, if your site is optimised properly, that a large chunk of those searchers will stop by your site. Some of them will stay and look around for a while and there potentially could be an extra client or two. If you have advertising on your site, the increase in traffic will likely correspond to an increase in revenue too.

So now that we know about another cartoon bruhaha and the reaction it is likely to cause amongst the certain segments of the community, now is the time to be posting to your blogs and uploading cartoons to your website.

While it may seem a bit crass to be generating income off any sort of crisis, the concept is no different to my pop-culture experiment. Just because the subject is a little more serious doesn’t mean the cartoonist cannot comment - and be paid to do so.