A recent article in the Wall Street Journal discusses the efforts of some comic book publishers to reach out and attract female readers. Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment (NYSE: MVL) are among the industry leaders looking to find growth by targeting the 50% of the population that's been overlooked by publishers for decades. They're finding great success with sales of manga, a Japanese genre of animation.

The strategy of targeting women is brilliant, and very similar to what Nintendo has done with Wii, allowing it to thrash Sony's (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation 3 in the video game wars. While video games are wildly popular, it's still a relatively small percentage of the population that plays them fanatically. For years, game makers have been targeting that hardcore group and making little in the way of progress in attracting new gamers. With Wii, Nintendo essentially told Sony, "You can have those hardcore, graphics-obsessed video game geeks" and focused on developing a product that would have massive appeal, especially to those who probably wouldn't even consider buying a PlayStation.

Rather than battling Sony for market share with the the small fraction of game buyers, Wii went and expanded the market, bringing in new gamers. They kill Sony, essentially by not competing with them directly. It's a great strategy, and it will probably lead to great growth for the comic book industry as well.

Following in the footsteps of Wii: Comic publishers target women originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In its never-ending quest to capture eyeballs, Time Warner is going for laughs. DCComics, home of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, has teamed up with Warner Books to cross promote a pre-publication version of Brad Meltzer's The Book of Fate, a graphic novel thriller chocked full of American historical tidbits.

Also on a comedic note, Turner Broadcasting System announced it will distribute two "very funny broadband destinations: veryfunnyads.com and Laugh Lab." Veryfunnyads.com will be the world's largest online collection of humorous commercials. Viewers will be able to email links to their favorite commercials. Veryfunnyads.com will offer periodic updates to its collection. This just could replace fantasy football leagues as many people's favorite work-time activity. Veryfunnyads.com launched today via a one-hour World's Funniest Commercials show on TBS. Laugh Lab will feature original materials from well known stand-ups, as well as encore performances of comedy materials already distributed by TBS. Viewers will be able to customize their choice of comedy videos.

Using the capabilities provided by its purchase of Truveo, Time Warner subsidiary AOL aims to be the premier web video site. AOL Video will provide online video search capabilities and will also carry thousands of hours of programming by partnering and sharing revenue with Arts and Entertainment network, the History Channel, Nickelodeon and MTV channels. The initial 30,000 videos also include on-demand news segments from ABD, CNN and Reuters. AOL plans to increase its sale of video ads to over $1 billion in the next few years as additional programming, both original and encore performances, is put on the Web. TV ad marketing is already a $60 billion per year industry.

Time Warner going for laughs originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 24 Aug 2006 06:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.