So far it hasn’t really had any effect on the ads that Google’s serving up - I have a feeling that even with the transcript, it’s still just too text-light to work, at least on single-comic archive pages. My monthly pages seem to come closer to useful ads, although it’s still just barely (for example, on a page which has a comic mentioning risotto the ads are all rice-related). I guess the text within my comics still just doesn’t lead to anything useful.

So, while it would be a good idea for contextual ads and serving folks with impairments, the damage it would likely do to a site’s Google ranking (and potential eligibility for AdWords inclusion) would likely far outweight the benefit.

Your suggestion of text below the comic, Joey’s suggestion of OhNoRobot, or proper use of alt tags would probably be better overall solutions.

That’ll take care of accessibility, indexing for searches, and context-sensitive ads all at once.

(Sometimes I’ve been lucky, and enough other people have already linked to the page using relevant text, like the time I searched for “grammar spork”. The phrase appears nowhere on the page containing the strip, but Google still figured out it should be the number-one result for the search.)

Just a thought.

I’m in the midst of presenting one of my new stories as a webcomic right now, and my artist and I are working hard at trying to make it at least worth our time. The contextual words thing has been a challenge, since there are so few words there.

It’s interesting, though, the various perceptions different people have of webcomics and print comics. You’d think, though, that if people are able to make money, it wouldn’t matter that they happened to be making money off, say, people who read comics . . .

Very interesting.