Whipped Cream Difficulties

The Duluth News Tribune is replacing “Blondie” with “Pearls Before Swine” starting February 6th.

I’ve pretty much given up newspaper comics, but I did kind of like “Pearls Before Swine”. As for “Blondie”, it was always one of those strips that took less effort to read than it did to skip; kind of banal, but not as offensive as “The Amazing Glacial Spider-Man”. (“This week: Spider-Man crosses the street! And we flash back to his origin yet again!”)

What makes this story noteworthy to me, though, is the paper’s reasoning for dropping “Blondie”:

…the DNT is charged roughly twice as much for “Blondie” as for any other strip, and more than five times higher than some. The Sunday “Blondie” is billed at $62.01 per week. By contrast, “Hi and Lois” costs $32.22, and “Beetle Bailey” only $11.67. Both of those are also distributed by King.

(“King” is King Features Syndicate. They also syndicate “Spider-Man”, and a small number of actually decent comics.)

(Wow. “Mandrake the Magician” is still being syndicated?)

It appears that the News-Tribune has a paid circulation of just under 30,000, based on the most current information I can find. Let’s be generous and call it 30,000 even: if I did the math right, that means they’re being charged about 0.2 cents per subscriber per week, or about 10.75 cents per subscriber per year. This is kind of an interesting insight into the business. King Features certainly does not make this information available online (they want you to call their sales weasels), and I can’t turn up current information for other syndicates either.

(Hattip: Jimbo.)