"For a small fee, people are getting exactly what they want in a Web site these days. They pick the news they want to read, the products they want updates on, and now, they can customize their own comics page," says Chris Pizey, vice president at uclick, an Andrews McMeel Universal company.

uclick is using Clickshare registration, site access and transaction management for the new custom-comics application. uclick launched its upuzzles.com subscription service with Clickshare last year.

Comics can continue to be accessed through uclick's free consumer site at www.ucomics.com and individual comics can still be e-mailed free daily. But it's the customization and ease of receiving all of a person.s favorite comics in one custom page that uclick is betting will entice people to pay to have their funny bones tickled.

Customization of Web content is a trend that is not going unnoticed. Americans spent $675 million for online content last year, a 92 percent jump over 2000, according to a report from the Online Publishers Association (OPA), mostly in the areas of business content, entertainment and personals.

The customized comics page with choices of more than 100 nationally syndicated comic strips and editorial cartoons costs $9.95 per year and first adopters are offered incentives of free cartoon collection books.

"Pricing a subscription service is always challenging. You want to make it affordable to encourage volume, but you can't under price the technology and the expertise it costs to provide the service in the first place," Pizey says.

Judging from the OPA report, people are willing to pay to have it their way. The number of Americans pulling out their credit cards for online content jumped, from 5.3 million in the first quarter of 2001 to 12.4 million in the same period this year.

www.mycomicspage.com allows users to view their custom page on the Web or the page can be e-mailed daily. Comics can be chosen from fields including newspaper favorites, political cartoons, kids, sports, offbeat humor, ladies. choice, family fare, workplace, serial and furry friends.

Marketing the new subscription service will be mostly through uclick.s current e-mail list of daily users, publicity and partner-site advertising. uclick is no stranger to the content for-pay business. Late last year, the company launched a subscription puzzle service, www.upuzzles.com in which for $29.95, subscribers can receive more than 70 crossword and word game puzzles weekly.

About uclick
uclick is an Andrews McMeel Universal company, a company which also includes Universal Press Syndicate and Andrews McMeel Publishing. As the largest packager and distributor of branded comics, word games and other content on the Web, uclick syndicates the highly sought-after work of more than 100 content creators to hundreds of Sites, including more than 200 Newspaper Web Sites. uclick content is also found on major portals such as AOL, Yahoo, MSNBC, and iWon. You.ll recognize many of uclick.s brands, including: Garfield, Doonesbury, Cathy, FoxTrot, Ziggy, Boondocks, Pat Oliphant, News of the Weird, Universal Crossword, Dear Abby and more. uclick is also building brands for the future, like Bizarro and Heart of the City. In addition, uclick develops and hosts Web sites for key creators including Garfield.com, Doonesbury.com and Ziggy.com.

About AMU
Andrews McMeel Universal (AMU) is the corporate parent company that includes Universal Press Syndicate (UPS) and Andrews McMeel Publishing (AMP). UPS is the largest independent newspaper syndicate in the world, distributing some of the most popular comics and features in newspapers today, including Garfield, Cathy, Doonesbury, FoxTrot, Ziggy, The Boondocks, Dear Abby and The Mini Page. Its features list includes famed columnists James J. Kilpatrick, John Leo and William F. Buckley Jr., as well as Pulitzer Prize winners Tony Auth, Roger Ebert, Mary McGrory, Pat Oliphant, Joel Pett, Anna Quindlen, Ben Sargent, David Shribman, Tom Toles and Garry Trudeau.

About AMP
Andrews McMeel Publishing (AMP), a division of Andrews McMeel Universal, is a leading publisher of general nonfiction trade books, gift books and humor books, publishing as many as 300 new titles annually. New York Times bestsellers from AMP include THE BLUE DAY BOOK and DEAR MOM by Bradley Trevor Greive; THE MILLIONAIRE MIND by Dr. Thomas Stanley; AMERICA: What Went Wrong? by the Pulitzer Prize-winning team of journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele; FOREVER, ERMA by Erma Bombeck; LAST CHAPTER AND WORSE: A Far Side Collection by Gary Larson; and IT.S A MAGICAL WORLD: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection by Bill Watterson.

AMP is also the premier calendar publisher in the country, annually featuring the all-time bestseller The Far SideŽ Off-the-Wall Calendar, as well as calendars based on many other top-selling properties such as Dilbert., Disney, Mary Engelbreit, and the long-time favorite Jeopardy!, among other characters and titles.

About Clickshare
The Clickshare Service is an Internet transaction infrastructure for shared authentication and single sign-on. It enables privacy-protected purchasing of text, music, video, software, and other products and services. Companies like Microsoft Corp., AOL/Time Warner Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., and the 35 companies which are part of the Sun-lead Liberty Alliance have identified so-called "single sign-on" and shared authentication as key requirements for Internet commerce. Clickshare is taking the lead in rolling it out for the newspaper industry.

With a Clickshare-powered account, consumers have one account at a most-trusted website and buy from other websites without having to pass around a credit-card number, repeatedly register or give out personal information. Banks, ISPs, associations, retailers, wireless and other telecommunications carriers use it to enhance, extend and share customer relationships with publishers and entertainment providers.

Among Clickshare's other news-industry partners are Belo Corp. (Dallas Morning News), the Denver Post (MediaNews Corp.), the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (McClatchy Corp.), Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, Comtex News Network Inc., China Online Inc., uclick.com (Andrews McMeel/Universal Press), The Worcester Telegram & Gazette (New York Times Co.), The Everett Herald (Washington Post Co.), and others.

Clickshare's investors include Sawgrass Seacoast Investors LLC, the University of Massachusetts, Comtex News Network Inc., MultiService Corp., and private individuals, including founding executives of PeopleSoft Inc., and the former publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Chicago Sun-Times. Its executives, board and advisors include veterans of the publishing and financial-services industries.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION:

For uclick/Universal Press
Kathie Kerr (800/255-6734, ext. 6945)
kkerr@amuniversal.com

For Clickshare:
Edward Bride 413-442-7718 [edbride@clickshare.com]
Bill Densmore, 413-458-7000, ext. 801 [densmore@clickshare.com]