The digital comics space is pretty busy these days, with GlobalComix, Neon Ichiban and Sweet Shop all vying for a piece of the pie as a comics-centric alternative to what is left of Comixology.
But how much do digital comics sell compared to print? Over the years, the number reported has consistently been around 5-10% of print sales, and a new report at Publishers Weekly by Zach Rabiroff backs that up:
Like other comic companies, DC doesn’t provide public figures for its total volume or revenue on digital sales, but DePies says that digital’s relative share of DC sales has remained remarkably stable over the past decade. That’s true of most other major publishers as well: at Dark Horse, VP of publishing sales Mark Bernardi says that digital readership leveled out to around 5% of sales many years ago, and has stayed in place ever since. At IDW, the share is a stable 10%. Image is a bit of an outlier; publisher and chief creative officer Eric Stephenson says digital sales have never recovered from a slide that started when Amazon bought Comixology.
Image’s digital decline is an example of just how damaging the changes at Comixology proved to the market.
ICv2’s annual White Paper also kind of gave up on digital, remarking that the digital share had remained flat for some time. However, in his last one in 2025, he did say that digital was “stirring.”
As the PW report notes, the huge webtoon market is stirring things up at digital, with various attempts at converting recognized characters to the format to reach the potential millions of readers. Digital is also a gateway for new readers, as DC’s GM Anne DePies observed:
And as new readers came to DC, new digital sales followed. “We’re finding an almost equal number of new readers coming in through physical and digital at the same time,” general manager Anne DePies says. “And once the digital readers come in, we’ve had meaningful success in seeing that they are purchasing across our ecosystem.”
This reminds me of a current and persistent rumor that Marvel is going to go all digital – which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. So stop saying it! It is true that when digital comics were new and shiny, people wondered if they would become a more prominent part of the industry…but they just haven’t. Even during the pandemic when you couldn’t even buy physical comics. When a market is flat, you don’t go all in on it.
But you do view it as a steady 5-10% figure includes Netflix-style all you can read programs like Marvel Unlimited and GlobalComix’s Gold Membership. At $70 a year these are both great deals, even if, just like with Netflix, certain titles or publishers can be withdrawn suddenly
We’ve run some digital charts here from various platforms over the years, and will continue to do so when presented with the opportunity – at least we can get an inkling of where that 5-10% is going.
