The creators' guide comic mentions that 6/10 readers are consuming our comics on mobile, I want to know if that's 6/10 in terms of overall statistics or 6/10 average per series.
Although I appreciate how important designing for mobile platform is. I get a distinct feeling that that statistic is skewed for the popular comics being shown on the front page which get a large percentage of the views. These same comics are so easily found by readers because they have the most subscribers and views anyway but they also get a lot of exposure by being on the home page constantly in both the webpage and the mobile apps.
I feel like I see the same comics being shown so often in the various platforms that they must be getting a large percentage of the views, but it's also incredibly hard to find the well made 'not so popular' comics on here that I often come across in the forums or through people's profiles that I would never have found on the mobile platform because it doesn't have the same features for discovering comics. In fact I don't really know how anyone on the mobile platform would find my comic at all unless they were searching for it specifically.
So far I have noticed that you are not able to go into anyone's profile on the mobile platform at all from the comments section, only if you are already in the comic page and click on the artist's name. It's not obvious that the artist has any other comics unless you click on their name which I somehow doubt is often.
This means mobile readers rely largely on the front page to deliver new content because searching for new comics is not transparent or easy to do.
I understand the team probably have quality control protocols, however a lot of artists need the validation of viewers and subscribers to keep up with producing more and better work.
At this time I'm quite sure a large percent of my viewers are from the web platform because these are traffic from the forums or other web links I or my readers may have shared. I really don't see how 6/10 of my viewers would have found their way to my comic at all through the mobile app.
Please enlighten me if I am wrong, I would love to be wrong, if I could find out why. I totally support designing for mobile consumption, my issue is that I truly doubt if this is an issue that effects creators not already being featured on the front page or in a collection that can be found by mobile readers.
If your comic does not become very good or interesting until quite some months down the line of production, does that mean those comics also lose out on ever being featured as 'new and noteworthy?' they are not new any more after all.
My post is seriously digressing, and I don't doubt that the team have the creator's best interests in mind but hopefully you can get the gist of what I'm saying.
I get what you mean is: "We're more likely to feature you if you have designed for mobile in mind. Because that way we can optimise the value of that feature because the bounce rate will be less."
I guess my gripe is: This is all good but the mobile platform is already biased towards featured creators, the web/mobile platforms are both heavily curated. Those of us not being featured, could be greatly misled by the thought that 6/10 of their traffic is mobile if it isn't.
I guess I should put this in the suggestions thread, but there should really be an un-curated feed of new comics that are released on Tapastic, most artists, especially the new ones aren't marketers, they don't know how to garner readers/find an audience for various reasons. My thought is that Tapastic should have something that could support them if they are below the 'feature' level/radar of what the staff thinks will be liked by readers.
There's a vast difference here between well know creators (many thousands of subs) and less well known ones with less than 100 subs, often the quality of their stories or art does not necessarily warrant this vast difference. The biggest factor is probably whether people can find you or not. Some artists who have done a lot of work artistically but very little on the social networking side may only have 10 or less subbers, this is really sad and I imagine discouraging to them if they don't realise how large a role marketing plays. Every time they produce a large amount of work less than 10 people are paying attention. Perhaps there should be a creators guide comic about marketing.
Please no one be offended but I feel there's a serious lack of 'democracy' here if the only way to expose the comic after making and releasing it is recommending it yourself or being featured -something that is completely out of your hands. There should at least be one un-curated feed somewhere that updates live with newly released comics whether or not it lives up to the staff's standards. They do this with deviant art for a reason. I've written an essay I know, my apologies. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think it would hurt much to have such a feed since it would be people's choice whether or not they wanted to use it or not right?