'Dilbert' Cartoonist Explains Why He'll Blog Less Often

By: E&P Staff "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams, who has written a lengthy blog entry almost every day for the past two years, has decided to do fewer posts.

Adams explained that he launched his blog for four reasons: ad dollars, compiling the best posts for a book, expanding the audience for his "Dilbert" comic, and "artistic satisfaction." He said all of the four reasons have not panned out.

"Readership of 'The Dilbert Blog' is growing rapidly, but at about the same rate people figure out how to use RSS feeds to get the content without the ads," he wrote. "So there's no longer a correlation between how hard I work and the ad income I earn. It topped out at 'trivial,' even while the audience grew to substantial."

Adams added that his recently-published book of blog posts -- "Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey-Brain!" -- received "great reviews for content, but angry reactions from people who feel that other people, who didn't read the content on the Internet, and never will, should not buy the book, to protect the rights of the people who already read it on the Internet, and might want to read it again for free sometime."

The cartoonist continued: "I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read 'Dilbert,' and make my flagship product stronger. Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably 'I can never read 'Dilbert' again' .... And a startling number of readers couldn't tell when I was serious or kidding, so most of the negative reactions were based on misperceptions."

Adams concluded that the blog has been "a source of tremendous artistic satisfaction. I enjoyed being relatively uncensored, and interacting with the readers on fun topics. That's why I will continue blogging, albeit less controversially. I'll just do it less often, especially over the holidays. It's hard to tell the family I can't spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income."

The "Dilbert" comic runs in more than 2,000 newspapers via United Media.