Question: Should you post RERUNS?!!
By Tracy on February 18th, 2010Posted In: Blog
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Is there such a thing? To me the answer is categorically NO!
I certainly would not encourage bloggers and webcomic artistes to re-post any material; even if the articles are ‘oldies but goodies’ or the blog owner didn’t have the time to produce new material. Best to miss a post date I say, than give your hard-earned and very fickle readers regurgitated articles.
If you find yourself without material to post on the day of publishing do please post a notice explaining the absence and naming the next expected publish date instead. Not only is that proper publishing etiquette but it’s responsible behaviour too.
In short, don’t run reruns.
I think it depends on how you approach using old material! I recently ran 2 comics from my old archive with an updated spin on the gags and it even brought on a third new comic to complete the activity. My readers seemed to react just fine to what I had done and accepted my reasoning behind it (I had a death in the family and my brain wasn’t able to wrap itself around creating fresh thoughts!) Rather than have the site sit idle, I stole old ideas of mine and polished them to keep the content moving and active.
I don’t recommend using old material or re-posting old comics verbatim out of laziness, but if you hit a sincere rut of some kind that slows you down and you still desire to keep your reader base engaged, I don’t think drawing on your archived material is bad thing.
I’m not sure I completely agree with this. It depends on the content. Should you randomly repost a comic strip, as if it’s new? Certainly not. But, some sites that have been around for a long time, may benefit from dipping into the archive, when appropriate. For example, if you’ve been running a strip for four years and every year you do a Halloween post, a legitimate new post might be one that reposts all four of them together.
I see your point Tyler, but even in that scenario I myself would not recommend it. I’ve seen it work better when the artist uses the same drawing with different text. It also works when an artist has started a related site where reposting material is relevant to introducing new readers to content. Otherwise, internet readers are so hard to come by and easy to lose that it is always a good idea to give them something fresh to want to come back to.