Comments on: Lies, Damn Lies, and Unique Visitors

By: Fleen: Written by bitter, haggard wordbeasts » Statistical Survey

Fleen: Written by bitter, haggard wordbeasts » Statistical Survey — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 16:18:45 +0000

[...] Gary Okay, what with all the responses I got for what Chris Hastings (congrats on getting past those ‘bandwidth exceeded’ errors, Chris!) called the science fair project, 48 of you were willing to share data. Deadline was a touch over 10 hours ago, with only one contact since the 11th. [...]

By: Fleen: Written by bitter, haggard wordbeasts » Requiscat In Pass

Fleen: Written by bitter, haggard wordbeasts » Requiscat In Pass — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:01:31 +0000

[...] Highly unscientific, but it’s about as good as you’re going to get, and that last number has been holding steady at about 72 — 73% even as the number of votes has gone up. And speaking of highly unscientific surveys, the deadline for getting in on the traffic/income analysis is next week, and we’re still only halfway to the 100 responses I’m looking for. Maybe with a few more hard numbers, BitPass might have fared better. [...]

By: Fleen: Written by bitter, haggard wordbeasts » On The Topic Of Webcartoonists And Webcartooning

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 17:01:24 +0000

[...] Speaking of traffic stats & business breakpoints (c.f.: last Friday’s post), an update: [...]

By: Digital Strips: The Webcomics Podcast

Digital Strips: The Webcomics Podcast — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 15:01:58 +0000

[...] Can you make a living doing webcomics? That’s what Gary Tyrrell at Fleen is trying to figure out. He looks at basic assumptions and asks readers who have their own webcomics to send their info along, so he can figure out the “tipping” point between hobby and livelihood. Related: Steven Crowley at Sequential Daze breaks webcomics into five categories based on readership. [...]

By: Joey Manley

Joey Manley — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 03:50:08 +0000

If you’re making noticeable money with a webcomic of any kind, you’re doing amazingly well.

By: Jeff Lowrey

Jeff Lowrey — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 22:34:39 +0000

If you’re making any money writing a webcomic who’s audience mostly consists of upper-middle-class women over 50, you’re doing amazingly well.

By: Joey Manley

Joey Manley — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 17:31:09 +0000

I really like quantcast.com right now for third-party metrics. It’s a two-pronged system. You get general traffic data from a javascript bug you can put on their pages, and you get demographic data from their randomly-selected Nielsen-like panel. My sites actually do better on, say, Alexa, than on Quantcast, but I trust Quantcast more. Don’t know why. So take that for what it’s worth.

If you’re looking to sell advertising, though — and not through some general network like AdSense, but with direct sales to larger advertisers — the demographic data Quantcast provides is very useful. Also might help in generating a merchandise strategy (if your audience mostly consists of upper-middle-class women over 50, you probably won’t sell a bunch of slogan-bearing hoodies, for example).

By: Howard Tayler

Howard Tayler — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 13:54:00 +0000

I’m with Kris on this one. I knew I was going to make it — I knew I had something bankable — when I surveyed my readers and got 4,000 responses, 80% of which said that Schlock was their #1 or #2 favorite comic.

10,000 responses that put me at #5 wouldn’t be significantly monetizable, because most of those folks would be spending their money with #1 or #2.

I get right around 20,000 uniques per day, and Webalizer’s algorithm puts me just above 30,000 “visits” per day. Into this audience I’ve sold around 5,000 books this year. That’s something like 1 book per year for every 4 daily uniques, which is ridiculously high — nobody who isn’t #1 or #2 with a large number of their readers is going to be able to sustain that (and it’s possible I won’t be able to sustain it — I only have one year of book sales to look at.)

By: Kristofer Straub

Kristofer Straub — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 06:10:40 +0000

The total audience is probably growing, but the total number of webcomics is growing faster, I think. At least, in the sense that the overall attention span of the average reader is dropping.

If there were only 10 webcomics on the entire internet, this whole audience would be divided among them, and I bet they’d sell a lot of books, a lot of shirts, a lot of everything. But if you have a list of 30 to trawl daily (that’s 30 you like, not counting 1,000 others), you’re not going to spend $20 on each one. You probably won’t spend $5 on each one.

So the obvious solution is to cultivate reader devotion and interaction, to get a better result from whatever audience you can manage to attract. You can do this from a niche. But of course the niche matters; if I did a webcomic for transgender theater undergrads, I probably wouldn’t sell merchandise no matter how starved for attention that segment is.

I’m convinced that to be successful now, you more and more have to leave what we consider to be the “webcomics” audience, and look for a place where you can be the only game in town.

By: Mr Myth

Mr Myth — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 03:05:06 +0000

Even more than whether or not more webcomics cuts down on the number of readers to go around - it also cuts down on the amount each reader can invest in any given comic.

Especially for the more dedicated readers (whom are often the ones buying merchandise and making donations), the more quality comics they are reading, the less they can really give out to each of them.