The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s death spiral isn’t just hurting Disney and its employees with box office bombs like The Marvels. It’s also destroying YouTube channels like Comicstorian that rely on anticipation for the content to make reviews and commentary.
In a bombshell video this weekend, Ben Potter revealed that his channel has been losing money for some time now, which might come as a shock to viewers who have been watching his content, which highlights the best of Marvel and DC’s major events over the years and distills the books in easy ways for viewers to catch up on storylines. Like many YouTube channels that reach that level of prominence, Comicstorian hired a robust staff to help produce and edit these videos and his other content.
Because of the channel being more intelligent comics-related content farms, Comicstorian blasted into massive success on a mainstream level with dramatic retellings of popular stories like Injustice from DC Comics, which tapped into both video game enthusiasts’ interests as well as lovers of Tom Taylor and Mike S. Miller’s classic comic.
He also capitalized on the success of Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse with multi-million-view videos on Miles Morales and Spider-Gwen’s origins.
Movies and video games often drive interest in these significant comic book event storylines, which in turn fuels YouTube searches for the characters and events with their fictional lives. Comicstorian caught lightning in a bottle as these superhero movies propelled interest to new cultural heights. His high production value offerings gave casual fans the background they needed on the characters to have a deeper understanding of Marvel and DC.
That all changed in 2020, according to Potter’s new video. COVID hitting slowed the production of films and ground the comic industry to a halt. It made the content harder to produce, and the offerings of Marvel and DC garnered fewer clicks than the previous content. He said the channel hoped to ride out the slowness of content and was kept alive by an angel investor who believed in his work.
But those funds eventually dried up, and as Marvel and DC began to push more woke content with their films and comics, interest in the Comicstorian content began to drop along with the companies’ properties. The channel needs that synergy of hotly anticipated events, whether from movies or comics, to garner enough views to pay its staff to produce these videos.
Marvel and DC have torpedoed their properties in recent years, pushing too much identity politics agenda in comics and films and driving away customers in droves. We already see the consequences with The Marvels opening to the lowest box office gross in MCU history. Still, it’s also impacting the comics as no one is buying books like Tim Sheridan’s new gay Green Lantern. This, in turn, makes it difficult to create content highlighting the stories that no one cares about and puts Comicstorian in a bind.
He gave an ultimatum to his audience over the weekend: join the Patreon and support the channel, or the channel will have to scale back and potentially shut down. This news hit his loyal fans, but it is a business reality as Disney Marvel circles the drain with its woke agenda.
What do you think about Comicstorian potentially shutting down? Let us know.
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