I went to bCx because I was fed up with the vote list I was on. Now, after 6 straight months of seeing "This Account Has Been Suspended" I am looking for a reliable vote list which will let me show a reward comic. Any suggestions?
[quote:68c9f38b12="William_G"][quote:68c9f38b12="pclips"]So sadly I have to leave, because I can't afford NOT to be part of a vote board.
These things are better suited for the tiny folk who need exposure.
You are beyond the need to be part of one.
That's an interesting point, and one I have considered. But I don't think I am, and I might never be. There are a number of good reasons to keep PartiallyClips on a vote list, even though I have an established readership of pretty good size.
1. Branding. There's value in just keeping the name of the strip visible. Everyone in the community has a certain number of titles they would think of if you told them "I'll give you a dollar for every webcomic you can name off the top of your head in five minutes." Being in the mental list among creators who don't even read my strip has a certain amount of worth. It's like having a consumer know that "Tide" is a major brand of detergent, even if that person only uses Clorox 2. So I am on vote lists for the same reason I let webcomics portals like webcomics.com show my current strip for free.
2. I like my vote comic. I do a vote comic that's essentially a screen capture of something I saw while surfing, with a snarky comment as a caption. Because I don't own the images, I can't exactly make these a regular part of my comic. But I like to do them, they're easy, and they're amusing. So they're perfect as a reward for my readers who care enough to throw me a vote a couple of times a week. Those who vote for PartiallyClips actually get upset when they can't vote, which is why I had to switch lists.
3. New readers are new readers. I'm not so big that I can afford to dismiss a hundred first-time clickthroughs from any source in a month. I may get just as many by being linked from another established comic, but you can't say no to fresh eyeballs.
4. It's doing little or no harm. Although I offer the vote incentive, I'm generally very low-key about it. My only goal is to have some rank on the main page for visibility's sake, not even the top ten. If I really mobilized my readership I could possibly be an annoying always-ran banner, but I don't consider that a very important goal for the comic. How popular it is is more important than how popular it looks. At least to a degree.
5. It keeps me in touch. You know I go to 12-15 cons a year, and the other creators I meet there mostly have established comics. I don't want that to be the ONLY set of creators I communicate with, though. It's real easy to get a skewed view of the webcomics world when you only pay attention to a few top titles and creators. Vote lists keep me clicking on new titles and communicating with new people.
We sent a list of things that could reduce the server problems to him and he shot them down. Simple pruning would fix most of the problems, but alas...
That said, my vote is for TWC, since it came back under DnDorks, I haven't had any problems with them, plus, if you want to, they have a thing that lets people vote for you on bCx from them too. That way, you only deal with the TWC buttons and stuff but still get the larger (albiet less reliable) bCx traffic.
I don't know what it is about vote buttons but they've always just rubbed me the wrong way. My domain is on a number of list pages but I don't display any buttons on my own site. It could be my dislike of any voting system in general as nothing more than a popularity contest, or it could be the minor mental image I get of the guy with two strips up that has the vote and donate buttons.
I do, however, see the power of an occassional click-thru here and there. Most of my incoming readers come from Google searches that I just happen to appear on. Whenever I upload an image to my Livejournal that number seems to double. But in the entire time I've been on any vote list I've maybe received 7 click-thrus from any of them and that's being generous. I actually get a fairly frequent amount of clicks from my belfry listing, which is little more than a text link on a massive comic index.
Visibility is an issue in some respects because I'm not on the main page. The problem with that logic for me is that you have to have a strong enough fan base in order to get to that main page in the first place. That makes me feel more like a strip is on there because people know about it, not because it's any good. I agree that a strip should actually have value instead of just looking like it does and the concept of brand name identification just feels more like a result to me than something intentional. Yes, I'd like to get a sample of my work in front of as many eyes as possible, but I'd also like readers to check it out just because they heard it was good. There are plenty of comics I know of but never bothered to check out because I never knew anything else about them.
I'm not knocking vote systems, I'm just saying they don't feel right for my site for some reason. It's probably related to the philosophy my strip carries of being an outsider that doesn't agree with the masses, even when those masses are made up of other outsiders. If you're able to maintain the consistency of voting readers it takes to stay on the main page of a voting site, you've already won half the battle in some respects
I understand you. My brief time on Buzz didn't really do anything for my site's traffic that updating didn't take care of.
And I got better things to do with my free time than dream up daily incentives.
Sure, I can see that. I agree that vote lists have the potential to be kind of evil, but that all comes from seeing your place on the list as some kind of goal in and of itself. I don't. It's not like the top ten people on the list get a check, like the top ten golfers in a tournament.
I just want the name of my strip to be in the mix somewhere, so the bored and curious will have one more channel to discover what I do, and stay around if they like it. I don't think you can completely rely on viral marketing, no matter how big you get. How much does Coke still spend on ads, even though it's everywhere?
And like I said, I really enjoy doing my reward comic (and there's nothing else I can do with it without risking a lawsuit). But every comic should have its own plans and priorities.
Yeah, been up for one and a half days then went down again. I'm really curious now as to what the problem is. I doubt it's really because they haven't paid.
I equate stuff like this to a lesson the guys from Pantera gave in a guitar magazine once. You can spend thousands on a great rig and have a sweet setup, but then you've got some crappy cables that short out and ruin your sound. Anytime a server konks out, especially during an influx of new visitors, you're hurting yourself over something that is barely worth the time to fix. My old server kept shorting out on days I paid for advertising on other sites. That kinda crap gets you nowhere so I moved. A bunch of sites like Buzz have the potential to be great for the community but they won't get anywhere if their pages don't stay up
And now TWC is down. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot.
They posted last night that they were doing some upgrade work or something, so I am sure it's related to that, but it's like the server gods have it in for vote sites lately. That'll teach me to feel smug about moving.
I have pondered the idea of a recommend list for Comixpedia but haven't gotten the script to work with Postnuke the way it should yet. (Postnuke powers Comixpedia).
I don't like the idea of rabid voting for the sake of "winning" either but I do like using metadata in creative ways to find new interesting webcomics. To make a top list more like a recommend list my wish list would include (1) votes from Comixpedia members count lots more - why? b/c I think members here would be more inclined to take the idea of recommending more seriously; (2) limiting voting to once a week - again to limit the mentality of campaigning for votes; (3) It would be nice to calculate comic "moving up" the charts a lot even if they're lower down in the vote totals and spotlight a few.
I know I've asked before but I'll ask again - anyone want to respond to my half-formed ideas above or just the general idea of adding some sort of "list" to Comixpedia.
See, I don't think there's anything to be "won" either. But when you consider that not every strip that says "I need to be on the main page" can actually do that, especially in one day like a few sites can, that's more along the lines of what I'm talking about. Randy at Something Positive was going through the Keenspace Guide and picking out random strips some time ago. (I'm not sure what the status of that is since I'm not a regular SP reader) That's more akin to how these things should work, save having some top spots for people who've climbed up the ranks. I mean, sure, we can probably all name at least 5 strips on the front page of the list, but do you know any of the comics on page 137?
The problem with what Randy is doing is that it'll take forever to get through the guide. If there was a way to use lots of people's input to decide which comics from the guide to look at first your time would be better spent 'cause you'd more likely read better quality efforts than just reading everything in alphabetical order.
On the old Big Panda page for example, it had a rotating "underdog" comic posted on the front page. I think that had nothing to do with votes, clicks, etc - it was just a random pick from comics not on the front page.
If the goal of such a list would be to bring attention to obscure yet deserving comics, that might be worth it.
But I don't know. On the one hand, I'm a fan of the natural selection process. We can debate to death the "what it takes" aspect of building an audience, but my sense is that comics which have "what it takes" will find their way to an audience one way or another. Most of the comics that are out on the Long Tail of the vote charts have not put in enough time for their total appeal. As I said in my Soapbox, comics with a low overall appeal take many times longer to develop a following. Let's face it, there are a lot of comics it would be a waste of everyone's time to feature.
On the other hand, everyone needs some encouragement and validation along the way to keep up their motivation. On that account, I think Randy's heart is very much in the right place. But Xerexes, you probably have a more pragmatic approach in mind, using the collective experience of Comixpedia members to better separate the wheat from the chaff.
Suppose you did something like this:
Create a little sub-site. Once a month, call for open nominations, including anonymous suggestions. Throw out any comics currently featured in the top 100 on any of the vote lists, or any you know are well-established. Then you and a few top Comixpedia people scan through the list, visit the sites briefly, and name four candidates a week. Post their links, ask Comixpedia members to choose their favorite of the four on a simple poll. At the end of the month, put the weekly winners up on a poll against each other. The winner of that is the Comixpedia's Pick of the Month and gets a free ad the following month.
Over a year you would collect 12 definitely clickworthy up-and-comers. You could even have a poll at year's end to name a Pick of the Year, a webcomics award which would carry real meaning, and yet couldn't possibly be won by Penny Arcade.
While I agree that Bob's Megaman MS Paint Explosion might not be as deserving as some comics on the list, we also know Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime. It's not hard for me to believe that there's plenty of up and coming talent out there that keeps getting ignored on vote lists because of the zany antics of a handful of popular strips
Indeed. Top whatever lists don't list the best comics around, but the most popular ones, so I mostly ignore them. But that's just myself.
I'm not certain if this is what you're thinking of Xerexes:
I've seen a lot of site that present various media by having a small image button, a brief description, link, and a little thing that says "Rate This" with five stars next to it. I assume that what it does is averages out the ratings people enter to get an overall score. Then they can be displayed from best to worst on a list.
If you can set up a simple system like this, it would allow the readers a chance to find new stuff. And maybe it may just give them the motivation to stop being so lazy about what gets handed to them as entertainment.
I don't think that all of the comics in "The long tail" are there because they deserve to be. One of the main problems I have with the "widest appeal wins the internet" concept is that it assumes the customer/ reader is always right. If anything, the customer is extraordinarily lazy, and since there is so much choice out there, they tend not to bother to look something up until they are told to.
We've all been trained to like what the taste-makers tell us to like. If the point of this thing is to expose the deserving, then this Comixpedia Top List or whatever will have to play the role of the tastemaker... to a degree.
I think the system I described would satisfy the demand for natural selection, and it may also act as a bit of a 2001 type monolith for some promising chimpanzees.
Hmm... I have an idea for a new kind of list, if you'd care to hear it:
You know my pre-occupation with webcomic links pages (my blog is a symptom of that). Wouldn't it be an good idea if we could have system similar to the Onlinecomics.net Favourites system, but with a useful twist?
1. Users of the system can register and upload details and banners for their comic (optional).
2. They also get to pick their favourite comics from the database and group them. The grouped comic are then displayed as a public link list in their profile pages (Sort of a personalised links page).
3. This serves three purposes:
a) It makes it easy for a user to check their favourite comics when away from their home computer.
b) If the user is a webcomic artist, then it makes the task of keeping an up-to-date links page much easier. Instead of manually having to hard-code the the links and download the banners for the comics being linked, it's all there and they can link directly to it instead. For plus points I suppose you could make the pages customisable and allow users to add descriptions.
c) This becomes a way to gauge the popularity of a comic (popularity being the number of times it appears on other user's link pages). Data from this allows a Top [insert number here] list to be compiled etc.
4. You could also have random pick feature, with a lowest and highest favourites threshold of maybe... being listed at least 5 times (this should be enough to filter out most of the really bad stuff) but not in the top 100 or something like that.
5. You could have a 'Other users who like this comic like [insert comic name here] recommendation feature too, like they do in http://www.webcomiclist.com and Onlinecomics.net
Anyway, just throwing out ideas.
I hadn't really noticed this thread before...
I guess officially the Webcomix Weview list is dead, the forum I ran on BCX, too. It's too frustrating trying to get other to do peer critique when it's almost impossible to post their critiques, or even read the rules.
So, my apologies to everybody who signed up, and didn't get a review...
And I'm right there with you---because the upcoming week my OWN comic was one of the two up for review. I kept on being self-sacrificing and moving it down if there was a conflict....
(I guess I could move it somewhere else---here, Drunkduck, keenspace forums, my own forum...but how would I alert everyone who was on the group about it? I'd have to go to every comic and get every email address, and that's a downer...especially for someone who has work, his own comic, duties here, etc.)
Oh, well, we've done over half the comics, and done it for over a year...I guess that's an enviable record.---Al
Heh. Uhm... yeah, I've migrated over to http://webcomicslist.com/ , even if Fuitad is not immune to problems running the site (re: some new features got accidentially deleted on Friday the 13th), but at least he's AROUND... also I get to help out over there, running the free advertising portion of the site, and generally not feel like I'm butting my head up against a wall of neglect (not that it wasn't fun admining the forums on bCx, but there came a point where the frustration of the downtime was driving me absolutely crazy).
So hey Al, wanna try the Weview thing on WCL? :) This time you'd get to be first XD
~Liriel
[quote:6a29410cfa="alschroeder"] I guess officially the Webcomix Weview list is dead, the forum I ran on BCX, too. It's too frustrating trying to get other to do peer critique when it's almost impossible to post their critiques, or even read the rules.
Why not do it here?
[quote:8db1285c8e="Liriel"]
So hey Al, wanna try the Weview thing on WCL? :) This time you'd get to be first XD
~Liriel
Yeah, and how is THAT gonna look? Oh, I'm running it, and by the way, I'm FIRST??? *Grin*
I'll think about it, and really---THANKS for the offer. Or I wonder if I should just move it HERE, since I'm involved with Comixpedia in so many other ways, and it might be something to enliven the forums here, which doesn't seem as lively as BCX at least USED to be, or the Keenspace forums, etc.
---Al
Ya know, it's too bad it couldn't be set up as an independent blog type of site where you would post a comic and folks could review as comments. That way you wouldn't be tied to any one forum or at the mercy of any administrator.
[quote:7cf694aa06="Liriel"]Hey yeah a blog type thing could work.
~Liriel
It could, but Comixpedia ain't so bad is it? :)
I think the only problem with a blog or comixpedia is that the boards here aren't too active, and a blog would have to build its audience. The webcomic weviews were at their best when a large community of people were behind them contributing(and it was often people that had been there for a while going past their quota, rather than new people joining just to add reviews and wait their turn). Things had dwindled a bit by the time Buzzcomix went down, and I imagine they won't be much better if they're started off in a new place where they'll have even less attention. So I'm not sure of how it should be approached, honestly.
[quote:f98d54204a="rezo"]I think the only problem with a blog or comixpedia is that the boards here aren't too active, and a blog would have to build its audience. The webcomic weviews were at their best when a large community of people were behind them contributing(and it was often people that had been there for a while going past their quota, rather than new people joining just to add reviews and wait their turn).
Well, one nice thing---Stef of SARAH ZERO http://sarahzero.com/ is trying to get MY comic reviewed (or is it weviewed?) and there's a thread both in her forum here at http://sarahzero.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1646#1646 and at mine at http://www.talkaboutcomics.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=28734 of people trying to do it, including Stef and Chooken, among others. So it's nice to know that some are trying to give me something back for the effort I put in.---Al
Strange how there still hasn't been an explanation or anything.
I was planning on dropping out of these lists anyway, but it was giving me more hits than I thought it was, so I'm not so sure anymore. =/
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Fed up with bCX, looking to move
I went to bCx because I was fed up with the vote list I was on. Now, after 6 straight months of seeing "This Account Has Been Suspended" I am looking for a reliable vote list which will let me show a reward comic. Any suggestions?
RE: Fed up with bCX, looking to move
try http://webcomicslist.com
RE: Fed up with bCX, looking to move
What has been going on there anyway? Are they just going over their bandwidth?
I think that's pretty much it. The buzz servers seem to be clonking out pretty regularly and for days at a time now
It's a great site, and I have enjoyed my time there and gotten a lot from it.
But after six straight months of random downtimes, it's crystal clear that they no longer care about running it. There's no other explanation for not dealing with a chronic hosting problem like this when there are so many cheap options for enormous bandwidth now. They can't possibly be doing more than about 500 GB transfer there (my guess is <200) so they should be able to get hosting for $100/month or less.
But it's just not a priority for them. So sadly I have to leave, because I can't afford NOT to be part of a vote board. Having a working vote list with reward comic hosting is an integral part of my overall marketing strategy. Having my core fans get extra content and having front-page visibility to random readers are both things I rely on. If you break the vote list, you break your core readers of the habit of voting and they lose interest.
I'll either go with webcomicslist.com or onlinecomics.net, I think. Onlinecomics.net has its act together best, but I am not happy with their setup. I like the straightforward main-page thing. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions.
Yeah, I don't really get what's going on at Buzzcomix. Like you said, it seems like they don't really care since it's been happening so often.
I haven't kept up with it since it changed management a long time ago, but you may want to check out http://www.topwebcomics.com/ . It seems like it brings in more traffic than webcomicslist.com .
I don't think there's much of a point in using onlinecomics.net the way you would use buzzcomix or other toplists for the reason you mentioned. The main page does have a list for news updates and comic updates though, so it may be a good idea to simply announce the comic updates at onlinecomics.net everyday while using another site for voting.
I've been getting more hits from TopWebcomics (where I'm currently in the top 40) than Webcomics List (where I'm currently in the top 20). I don't know if it's a traffic thing or my description line needs changing, though.
OK I went back to TWC, after almost 2 years. Their servers seem kind of slow but we'll see how it works out. My readers put me on the main page in the first 10 hours after the change, so it may actually be better for my purposes than bCx. I'm not interested in living for the top ten...that's not why I use a list. All I want is to stay in a visible spot and get a trickle of curious readers, as one more pathway for new readers to find the strip. Thanks for the advice, all.
[quote:2d7f00f5fc="pclips"]So sadly I have to leave, because I can't afford NOT to be part of a vote board.
These things are better suited for the tiny folk who need exposure.
You are beyond the need to be part of one. You need it as much as having a pencil stuffed up your bum.