Summary

model and increase the number of fans worldwide, not just in Singapore.
Section 3.
THESIS OBJECTIVE
The impact of social media on web comics has been significant. Previously, the only route
was to either use internet platforms designed for artists, such as Deviantart and Smack Jeeves, or to
put up one’s own blog. However, this posed two problems. First, the audience of Internet platforms
that hosted artworks was essentially artists, not regular readers. The second problem was that readers
had to register on that specific platform or blog service in order to subscribe to updates. Even if they
had subscribed, many of them do not login every day and the latest news soon became buried under
other updates. Fortunately, with the immense popularity of social media now, an increasing number
of people are logging in every day to check out what their friends are doing or to obtain promotional
offers from their favorite brands.
The objective of this thesis is to analyze how to harness the power of social media and other
Internet services to formulate a business model and marketing strategy for Evacomics. This also
includes the segmentation and targeting of audiences and possibly creating new content to better
serve them. The new business model and marketing strategy should be designed to enable an artist to
perform a one-person act of creating and marketing the entire business by using Internet services.
Section 4.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This thesis studies comic strips, social media and other Internet services in order to
recommend a business model and marketing strategy. Therefore a qualitative research method based
on own experience, observations and case studies is adopted. Two comic strips series, “Penny
Arcade” and “Wan Wan”, are chosen as successful cases to learn from because these webcomics
allowed their creators to earn a living by making them. The main purposes of these two case studies
are to examine how they promoted their webcomics initially, their business model, and marketing
mix that includes how they are using social media now to reach to their fans. Another Singaporean
comic book, “Teddy”, which makes active use of social media, is also examined to evaluate the
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