Monday, November 18, 2013

Market Research: An attempt to answer

For my last post, I attempted to identify a certain demographic by asking specific questions in order to sell my product better. Now, it's time to try to answer some of those questions.

How many comic journalists are there?
Well, so far I know of one. Joe Sacco. He's technically the pioneer in the medium. But there are other people who are starting to catch on as well. At this website, a man describes what he would like to see for the future of comics journalism. And how he doesn't like the term "comic journalism" in order to describe the comics news industry. About specific numbers, though, I'm not sure what my competition looks like. 

How many people buy comics?
According to the same website above, comic books sales may have hit a slump after 1993, but recently hit a high. My only sources for actual comic sales are not completely trustworthy, but Wikipedia says Marvel made $125 million in 2007. Then Disney bought it. If Disney wants a company like Marvel, who is to say that a large corporation like Disney would not want journalism in comic form at a later date? 

How many people consume news on a yearly basis?


According to a People-Press article, news consumption is going down for television, radio and print. But hey look at that! Just as we talked about in class, online and mobile news is going up. That could be good news for my company, which could sell printed comics journalism as more of a novelty and an extra revenue than a main source. 

What ages consume news? Is it all ages?
According to this article about Twitter, young adults find a good source of their news on the social site. I think, then, it is safe to assume that older generations, like my sweet grandmother, still have not taken to the social media, or even online, forms of news. This is not true for all, certainly, but the older generation folks I've talked to have deemed the internet confusing except for occasionally checking an email.  So if I want to target my business only at young people, I can use social media, like Twitter and Facebook, as a means to spread awareness about my product. 


How much time do people dedicate to news?
While I couldn't find the numbers to this question specifically, I did find one one business article that talks about how we are always online. If we're always online, an online news source would have some luck. However grabbing and holding attention would be the trick with that method. That's why I would want to print some of my news, as well, so that people know what it means and what it stands for both on and off a screen. 

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