Comics Are the Most Expensive Source of Entertainment and They Shouldn’t Be
Have you ever calculated how much more expensive one source of entertainment can be than another? Did you ever think about how much it costs you to watch 10 minutes of a movie? How about reading 10 minutes of a book? Or listening to 10 minutes of a new album? Or 10 minutes of a comic book? Can you guess which one would be the most expensive? If you read comic books on a regular basis, then you already know the answer.
With comics, time is money. BIG money.
For many of us, comics are a lifelong love, and we give this mistress an enormous chunk of our entertainment budget. Let’s put it to the test and see exactly how much this love costs us, especially in comparison to other ways we spend our free time. Let’s take 10 minutes as a unit of measurement–because this is how long it usually takes us to read a 24-page issue of a comic book. Shall we start?
10 Minutes of a Movie
This depends on where you are watching the movie–whether you are watching it at home or in theaters. The cost of that 10 minutes can vary significantly. 10 minutes of a movie lasting 120 minutes at the theater will cost you around $1. But, if you rent a movie at a Redbox for $1.50, you’ll end up paying 12.5¢ for the same 10 minutes of Liam Neeson kicking ass and getting back what has been taken from him.
Movies: 12.5¢ to $1
10 Minutes of a Book
That’s a tricky one because we all read at different speeds. Fortunately, a California gift company called Personal Creations has compiled a nice list of classic books and how long it might take you to read each one at an average rate of 300 words per minute.
Image Source: personalcreations.com
So, if we were to take the Lord of the Rings series and its insurmountable 473,000 words, it would take us 26.28 hours without breaks. We found the LOTR trilogy in a 4-volume paperback box set (that includes The Hobbit) at $21.58. According to LOTR Project, The Hobbit contains 95,356 words, which adds 5 hours and 29 minutes to our total time spent reading the entire 4-book series. In conclusion, 10 minutes of reading at a rate 300 words/minute would cost 13¢.
Books: 13¢
10 Minutes of Music
Long gone are the days where people buy full albums. Buying one song at a time is the way most of us consume music nowadays. If you’re not pirating music for free, and we trust you are not, you usually pay 99¢ to $1.29 for a song.
http://www.ifpi.org/global-statistics.php
According to Stat Crunch, the average length of the top 100 songs on iTunes is 180 seconds (3 minutes). But that doesn’t mean that our 10 minutes of music-listening costs us $3.50 because when we buy a song, we usually play it until it makes us sick.
According to Mic.com, we love listening to the same songs over and over again due to the “mere exposure effect.”
If on average a song would play 50 times before it goes silent, the real cost of 10 minutes of music would be 8¢.
Songs: 8¢
And Finally, 10 Minutes of Comics
Today’s comics come in different shapes, sizes and page counts. The price of a standard 24 page comic varies from $1.99 to an astonishing $3.99, depending on how hot the title is. But no matter how you slice it, reading comics is the most expensive 10 minutes of entertainment around. That means that one hour of quiet comic book reading will cost you, on average, $17.94. For just 6 issues? That is ridiculous!!
Comic books: $0.99-$3.99
About the Author: Felix Kiner is the CEO and Founder of ComicsFix — a digital platform that offers thousands of creator-owned and independent comics and graphic novels for an insanely low monthly price ($8.99/month). Get your free trial here: ComicsFix.com