On Monday, Brett Booth (Bloodshot) indicated on social media that comic book creators pay comic book news sites to cover their crowdfunding projects.

This revelation came as Booth engaged with a barrage of questions from comic fans asking him if he would ever consider crowdfunding his own project (it doesn’t look like he’s interested at the moment). As part of his rationale, Booth included his own estimates of hidden costs in running a crowdfunding campaign, where he noted that campaigners “have to pay for those comic news site write-ups as well.”

When we asked him for specifics, Booth noted that crowdfunding creators told him in 2018 that they paid between $1200 and $1500 for coverage of this kind. Below are excerpts from this interaction.

Booth did not specify which comic book news sites have this policy, nor did he mention specific crowdfunding campaigns to have paid for coverage. Perhaps this is at least part of the reason why some campaigns are covered by bigger comic book websites while record-breaking projects like Jawbreakers, Icarus and the Sun, and Cyberfrog are largely ignored, but only sites with this policy can say for sure.

For the record, while we do not have nearly the same reach as a CBR or Bleeding Cool, The Splintering has not accepted – nor have we been offered – any monetary incentive to cover crowdfunding campaigns. We have covered dozens of independent projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and on occasion we are offered free/advance copies of games or comics and our policy is to fully disclose when this occurs.

So what do you think about this revelation that some crowdfunded comics pay for their coverage on major comic websites? Is your mind blown, or does this simply confirm suspicions you already had in the first place? Let us know in the comments!