Not that I think the way you're doing it now is junk...
Have you guys considered going more "Magazine"-ey? Instead of having four or five new articles a week, why not have it all come out in one block-buster issue once a month?
Say the cover links to the contents page, where all of your editorials, reviews, interviews, and thesis papers on webcomics can read in one lengthy, tasty meal.
As for the developing news, you could have a blog sepcifically for that purpose.... since that seems to be how it's going now, anyway.
Whadda yah think?
I like the weekly approach. I like that with the forums, it's worth my time to check here every day. If something is monthly, people tend to forget about it. I like comics that update monthly, but I don't always get back to them that month, but will wait 6 months and read all the updates at once. It doesn't work that way with news sites.
And think of the enormity of an update it would be if comixpedia crammed all its content into one update! No one could read it in one sitting! So they'd miss out on stuff. No, the content updated each week is usually perfect to read all at once and weekly updates are easy to keep in mind. I can't see any reason whatsoever to go monthly.
Monthly works for less newsy magazines, like Vogue or GQ or what have you. Newsweek, Time, etc are weekly. So here, monthly works well for the Webcomics Examiner, with its less timely and more lengthy features and the same content in month that Comixpedia, with its different focus, puts out in a week.
My experience is that more frequent updates tend to make for more popular websites. This isn't always true, but it is true often enough that going against the common wisdom needs a really good justification.
Joey
www.moderntales.com
Another work for the weekly approach. On the web, frequent updates work better than not-frequent.
Maritza
CRFH.net
I know, the internet is the land of the demanding, impatient person who wants everything NOW NOW NOW, but it was just an idea.
Hence why weekly webcomics have a much harder time building large readerships than daily webcomics.
[quote:ebd4312edd="Ghastly"]Hence why weekly webcomics have a much harder time building large readerships than daily webcomics.
Exactly. A lot of time left between updates means risking people will forget to check your comic or website.
People seem to enjoy reading comics and websites more often in smaller portions than reading large updates only every so often. If a comic or website can become a brief part of their daily routine, they are more likely to incorporate it into their schedule.
I think the internet attention span thingy's unfortunate. If updates are sparser, they tend to be better. Sure that's not necessarily true, but a comic-ist updates every couple weeks would have more time to perfect their work, I would think. It would avoid the "I've got to update everyday" comic rush, and allow for more edited and bettering and biggering. If Delinasdahsfjafgk Life went monthly, and it was worth the wait, then it might be a good idea.
Don't get me wrong though. You can still become popular with a weekly comic. Tang, Hard, and myself are all proof of that. But it is much easier if you're able to update daily particularily if you run any sort of storyline.
I can't imagine trying to run a storyline with only one comic a week, anytime I have a story arc in my strip I'm limited to about 4 strips to tell the story which means it takes a month to tell it. There are some weekly comics that are story driven. I rather like "Our Home Planet" but I can't read it like a would "Tang's Weekly Comic" which I check out every week. I only read OHP once a month or once every two months, and catch up on all the back strips since the last time I read it otherwise the story just plods along at too slow a pace to hold my interest. Even three comic/week storyline comics move a little too slow.
I read "MegaTokyo", but only every two months or so, going back to catch all the strips I missed (which once the Dom and DPDs are removed tends not to be too many) simply because the storyline moves too slowly to read at a regular pace. "Penny Arcade", however, I read each day it updates because there's no storyline to follow and any story arc lasts only a few strips. they're both 3/week comics but "Penny Arcade" has a much faster pacing because it's a gag strip.
"Sluggy Freelance" I read every day. It's storyline driven but posting daily gives the story a faster pacing.
About the only less-than-daily storyline comic I read each day it updates is "Errant Story" and that's because Poe is a fricken genius. Great writing and great artwork which is a rarity in the webcomic world as most people are either great at artwork and weak on writing, or vice versa.
If you're doing a storyline comic I really think 3/week is the minimum update schedule you should maintain, especially if you're interested in having anyone read it. Gag strips, however, are able to get away with only updating once a week. Of course you can combine the two like Tang's "T.A. Vision" which is a storyline strip, but each page of the story is also a gag. I read TAV each week, but if it didn't have the gag each week I'd likely only read it ever month or two like I do with "Our Home Planet".
Comixpedia is both a magazine and a community if that makes sense. The site hosts the magazine but has other aspects to it.
I think the weekly installments for the magazine work better than a monthly schedule mostly for the same reasons Mequinn above noted. We do plan the magazine as a "monthly issue" but we decided from the get go that weekly updates would work better for us and our editorial process and for the readers.
We've made several changes behind the scenes this year to keep Comixpedia on its feet and hopefully improving. We're not only open to ideas and suggestions but newcomers who want to volunteer to work on something here.
I just wanted to comment on this topic in reference to The Webcomics Examiner, which does publish on a monthly basis:
The Examiner's advisory board didn't devote a lot of consideration to weekly vs. montly, because as a practical matter we've had to start off as monthly. But I can think of some reasons why it's been a comfortable fit for us--
First, when a new issue comes out, it is a relatively impressive debut-- eight or nine hefty features and a new cover all appearing on the same day. Generally there's as much there as anybody's gonna wanna read in one sitting-- like in the TV commercial, they can walk away saying 'I'm full!'
Secondly, we don't particularly want to embrace the immediacy of the web, because we don't want to cater to short attention spans. For quality webcomics to thrive, we need to foster a new kind of readership that thinks of comics as more than a momentary diversion.
And finally, a monthly magazine is, I believe, more satisfying for the staff. It puts everybody on the same track, working towards the same deadline. And it puts our writing in context with each other, which in some ways is healthy competition, and in other ways is complimentary and reinforcing.
Monthly updating does seem to work for the examiner and its content, and provides the benefit for a new magazine that Joe can go post info about a new update in places to get the word out without it being, well, like the folks who start their new comic and start plugging the first one in a general forum and then start a new topic for the second comic... When the WE updates, it's something worth plugging and I'm sure people are grateful to be reminded in this way, rather than irked.
Also, in the Demonology 101 feature Damonk and I did last month, we talked about Faith's updating schedule. She had done weekly or bi-weekly updates with a sizable pagecount. Because her updates usually contained an entire scene, it wasn't necessary for her readers to do what Ghastly's mentioned. I do the same thing with a lot of slowly updating storyline comics. It's impossible to read them as they update, and this way, I can just get back to them when I'm in the mood for a certain kind of story. But Faith's model is a good one for people who have comics where each page doesn't read well singly, but as one of many. Of course, that leaves out the equation of whether page per day updates are good for keeping the artist on track...
-Meaghan
The less frequently you update, the more important notification tools like RSS feeds and newsletters become.
One of the goals of MT was to give less-frequently-updating storybased comics the benefit of a daily website -- if a weekly (or even monthly) comic is on its own site, people will forget to go back and look at it, especially if it's relatively new. But the MT homepage updates daily with new comics, so folks (especially non-subscribers) get in the habit of checking that homepage every day.
That said, our most popular feature, by far, is a daily strip -- Narbonic. Sometimes it seems that all of MT is standing on Shaenon's shoulders.
Joey
www.moderntales.com
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Tell me why this wont work
Not that I think the way you're doing it now is junk...
Have you guys considered going more "Magazine"-ey? Instead of having four or five new articles a week, why not have it all come out in one block-buster issue once a month?
Say the cover links to the contents page, where all of your editorials, reviews, interviews, and thesis papers on webcomics can read in one lengthy, tasty meal.
As for the developing news, you could have a blog sepcifically for that purpose.... since that seems to be how it's going now, anyway.
Whadda yah think?
It seems to me where this argument falls down is that there are weekly magazines in printdom. In printdom such decisions as weekly vs. monthly are made, I imagine, on the basis of distribution costs and/or rate of generation of new material vs. keeping the name active. On the web distribution costs are a relatively much smaller factor and the time increment decision can be based entirely on whether you want the readership to think of you as often as you can generate new material. Why not?
I like having new material at Comixpedia weekly. I'd like having new material daily. Including the blogging and forums, there usually is. I like.
Paul Gadzikowski,
http://www.arthurkingoftimeandspace.com New cartoons daily.