Wowio Acquires Drunk Duck From Platinum Studios

[Rob]

Although I haven't seen anything about this on the actual Drunk Duck website (or for that matter at Platinum Studios... it seems the only site that is saying anything is Wowio) it appears that Wowio has purchased Drunk Duck from Platinum Studios.

Here is all the coverage I could find on the subject starting with the Wowio news post and official Press Release.

http://news.wowio.com/2010/06/drunkduck-joins-wowio/  - News Post

http://corporate.wowio.com/pr_100608/    - Official Press Release

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum_Studios   - Wikipedia Page on Platinum Studios...

This is interesting. According to the Wikipedia Page, Platinum Studios bought Drunk Duck and then bought Wowio. Then, in 2009 Wowio was sold to someone else and Platinum no longer has any ownership percentage in Wowio.... and now Wowio has bought Drunk Duck.

More news.

http://tinyurl.com/2vk949p

http://tinyurl.com/26qkmow

http://tinyurl.com/2fdlk5o

http://tinyurl.com/245me2j

http://tinyurl.com/2ahmj9l

I know a lot of you have connections to Wowio or Drunk Duck so I'll try and gather as much news and opinion on this subject as I can find out; as it becomes available.

[Rob]

I was just linked this... apparently the acquisition was leaked last Friday by the CEO of Wowio and he spelled out not only a vision for what it is they have in mind for the future of Wowio, WeVolt and now Drunk Duck, as well as letting it be known that there will be at least one more acquisition announced in the near future.

Watch.

http://www.vimeo.com/12298334

[amanda]

Well anyone can handle the Duck better than Platinum.  I didn't realize Plat had sold Wowio though - good move.

[Rob]

Wowio is apparently a privately owned and investment capitalized company right now.

A few more MoneyTV, Wowio related vids.

http://vimeo.com/videos/search:wowio

[Rob]

I asked D.J. Coffman; who has a well known and storied history with Platinum Studios to weigh in on his thoughts on this acquisition. His thoughts follow unedited:

It all seems like a big shell game of sorts to me. From private, to public, to private again... makes one wonder! Sleight of hand PR. Take a look at that press release! Does Drunk Duck really have 95,000 active members!?! I highly doubt that! The news about Wowio acquring "WeVolt" makes it seem as if WeVolt was a thriving "social network" when in reality it's an ALL NEW venture cooked up. It's really bad marketing using buzz words hoping to make it all seem like a bigger deal than it is.

It doesn't take Dick Tracy or Sherlock Holmes to know the facts are that Platinum was short on cash and owed a ton of money to COO Brian Altounian, as you can see from Platinum's public market records. These companies do a lot of selling things with "shares" and stock and "value" and spend "phantom" monies... but in reality what's happened is Platinum owed Altounian some money and instead of actual CASH they're paying him with things Platinum owed. First Wowio, now Drunk Duck. I wish them all all the best in the world, but it's just a really shady shell game going on on the business side. I get the idea that Brian Altounian wants to make Wowio look so AWESOME that he could sell it off to a fortune 500 brand like Amazon, Apple or Microsoft or ANYTHING. When that happens, he wins. And hey! That's pretty genius from a business side of the aisle.

We'll see about WeVolt and Drunk Duck and Wowio if they are REALLY for "creators" and rooting for the little guy. It really seems "fabricated" to me though in that press release. Time has shown that Platinum wasn't really in that game, and time will show what Altounian is really up to as well with Wowio and his "Alliance Acquisitions" company. VaporWare! From the looks of it, it doesn't appear to effect creator rights in anyway. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that my wish is that they totally create something that's going to allow and actually make creators make a living off their content. Instead of all the content being a way to sell to a bigger brand off the backs of those creators.

Time will tell... but for now, perception is reality!

Also, I sent D.J. the link I put here before for the "MoneyTV" videos and he sent this reply.

Also, it's always been funny to for me to note to others that that MONEY TV stuff, you actually have to PAY to be on that show. So everytime you see Brian Altounian on there, they've paid to play there. It's not "REAL" news. Smoke and mirrors...

[Gibson]

I had a lot invested in Drunk Duck a few years ago when I knew seriously nothing about webcomics. These years later, I'm starting to know what I'm doing and I realize more and more all the time how broken Drunk Duck is and has always been. I can't imagine anyone spending the time or the capital to make the site come even close to functioning, and I suspect the only way it could happen anyway is to rip the whole thing out by the code and start from 0, which no one will. I'd love to think that Wowio will sweep in and fix it, but it won't. Drunk Duck has been a joke for a long time, but now it seems like a hot potato too.

[Funderbunk]

I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt. Who knows, maybe it'll be decent now.

[JGray]

Interesting. I suspect this is a wait and see sort of maneuver. Wowio is a business. They want to sell books. Platinum was the same way. I suspect Wowio will treat Drunk Duck much as Platinum did, as a farm to grow and harvest product for their commercial venture. The question is, will they treat their webcomickers the right way when they do? Or will we get another Hero by Night bruhaha?

[Cary]

Wow that was fast! They totally revamped the Wevolt site in like...two days. When I hit Locus Monday it was the same as it had been for months. Today...completely different. And ANNOYING! You have to opt into the site for content which pisses me off right off the bat, and then what had been a pretty unobtrusive layout is now swarming with extra Wevolt content and lacking the user specified stuff like the customized banner and such he'd put in. Now it doesn't look like a LOCUS webcomic as much as it looks like just another Wevolt comic among the crowd. I get what they're trying to do...I just think it looks like hammered ass. I haven't even hit the Drunk Duck website in...three or four years honestly. Nothing I've seen over there makes me want to go back, you know? When I was trying to make my way through the HBN stuff the rest of the mess just drove me crazy to the point I said screw it and gave up. Seeing all this happen makes me REALLY happy I went with my own domain and can do what I want without interference from the corporate power mongers. It may take me longer to build up a fan base, but that's alright. At least I don't have to put up with...that.

[Gibson]

Cary, you may want to consider at least a mirror on Smack Jeeves. Even the free hosting is really good and easy to customize and use (and generally without hideous banners everywhere), but if you want a little more it has a couple levels of pay options that are great. In three years, there's been hardly any technical problems and what few I've had were dealt with really quickly. Even more than that, the folks who run the help desk are pretty eager to help with non-tech problems and will give you a hand working with the coding or tweaking template designs. It has a bad rep and the community has a lot of kids in it, but they're ignorable. I do my own thing there and get about 80%+ of my readers off-site. It's worth taking a look around, at least.

http://www.smackjeeves.com

[Cary]

Cool Gibson, thanks for the heads up sir! I do have a couple of questions though, so forgive the new guy here.

1. What's the advantage of having it at Smackjeeves over my own hosting and domain? Do you get more "walk up" type traffic do you think, or what?

2. What's the cost on that? Honestly it's not a big deal really as I can afford it, but I'm just wondering what the cost comparison is to what I've already got, you know?

After checking out your specific site as well as the main home page I have yet MORE questions! lol Nice stuff you have there by the way! Once I get done caught up with a couple other webcomics I'm trying to read up to date I'll definitely be starting this one!

Anyway, how much of the banner ads and stuff did you put there versus what they require? Do banners get reduced with paying accounts? I didn't find your banners and ads to be at all distracting, but there are a couple others I checked out that were wallpapered with them so it made me curious. Also, you said it's easy to customize...do they offer all the little graphic buttons and such to choose from, or is that all your doing? Sorry, told you I was new to this! You should have see how badly I obsessed over my site when I was building it! I don't think I slept for 3 days!

[Gibson]

There's another thread where we discuss the benefits of hosting vs autonomy, here, which is probably better to read than it would be for me to try to sum it up here, but the walk-up traffic is part of it...not all, but part. As for the ads, every ad on my site is my own, and you might have noticed the only links to the main site are fairly small and unobtrusive. I pay $19 a year for what's called Donator Membership, which features having no site-ads on my pages, a small amount of on-site promotion, and a certain extended limit on page upload size (more than I've ever needed.) There's another level above that too called Premium Membership, to which I'll probably be upgrading soon, which has a lot of other features, including a handful of email addresses and being able to have your own url (like www.dynagirl.com or what have you) that is still powered by Smack Jeeves, so you can have benefits of both hosting and autonomy.

Here are some examples of sites from the various memberships:

Standard (very bare-bones, no coding whatsoever)
Donator with custom coding
Donator without custom coding
Premium (fully coded by user)

The first three are my own comics, the fourth is by Ran Brown. Note that the template used in the Donator without coding example is available to anyone, even the Standard members. There are a lot of different site-templates to choose from, some are pretty ornate, and they keep adding more.

All I can really say is that I've been with SJ for almost 4 years doing one comic or another, and more than 3 years with Pictures of You, and as it becomes more and more popular, the more comfortable I become with my decision to host there. Every other webcomic host I've heard of (or used) has been littered with horror stories and hate mail, but SJ gets very few complaints from me.

[ran]

Ugh, I wouldn't use the hollow page to convince people to go SJ premium. Mostly because it isn't there anymore.