ComiXology Celebrates 50 Million Downloads (Kinda) & Gives A Peek At The Bigger Picture

As of March 3, 2012 ComiXology can celebrate 50 million downloaded comics since their launch. And 5 million of those 50 million came in [last] December of 2011; that’s 10% of their entire download history in one month. Just 3/4 months prior to the news.

So yeah, digital comics are trending up. And it’s no surprise that ComiXology is leading the niche revolution. Course, like all numbers, this can be broken down.

ICv2, who published the news notes:

..a significant percentage of the 5 million comics downloaded were free

And Comic Book Resources makes a good case for that “significant percentage” being over 50%:

it must be pretty high, as ICv2 estimated the entire digital comics market in 2011 at $25 million; even if everybody bought their comics at comiXology, during one of its 99-cent sales, that would still mean only half the downloads were paid.

So if less than half the downloads were actually paying customers (lets be generous, say 45%) that’s around 2.25 million purchased downloads for ComiXology in December 2011. In the same article ICv2 compares these December download numbers to the estimated comic sales that month:

ICv2 notes that the five million comics downloaded in December 2011 compares to roughly 6.4 million comics and graphic novels sold into the comic store market in the same period

Going with our 45% of that 5 million being actual purchases, so 2.25 million, that’s ComiXology selling 35% of what the entire print side of comics did in the same month. Even if that percentage is lower (which it probably is), that’s a pretty interesting picture were being painted on the growth of digital comics and where they currently stand.

Now, it’s worth noting that 6.4 million print comics sold is an estimate based on what retailer’s ordered, not sold. And ComiXology potentially selling 2.25 million comics in one month doesn’t get us any closer to knowing how many people are actually purchasing new comics, day-and-date. In fact, I think it’s a pretty good bet that most digital comic purchases are not new comics (since this is most of the digital comics library). And finally, unlike the monopoly Diamond has on print comics ComiXology is one of many digital comic retailers competing for your bucks like Graphicly, iVerse, and now Amazon.

So what does all this mean?

What does ComiXology’s milestone say about digital comics?

Well, even if our number are high – when you account for the rest of the digital comics industry and the margin of error in the print sales, it’s pretty fair to say that digital comics bring in at or right above 25% of what print comics bring in per month. And to give you more context ComiXology’s Apple App Store app, “Comics by comiXology,” launched in July 2009. 30 month’s from the December 2011 data provided.

That’s some serious growth. Not just for ComiXology, but for all digital comics.

And when revenue strings grow that fast important companies and important people notice and start to hop on. We’ve already seen this with almost all publisher’s offering their comics digitally to some capacity now. I’d image the industry will start to see more experimentation (typical of new streams); DC’s $1 drop after a month of being released and Marvel starting to include digital copies with print are just two examples.

No matter what (and more on the digital conversation later), congrats to ComiXology for a big milestone; here’s to more comics being read no matter how!

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Tags: Comic Book Sales Digital Comics