Blaugust #4: Webcomics Advertising Numberwang

(Image from irasutoya.)

I couldn’t go more than a post or two before talking about some comics business nonsense. You know me.

Some months ago members in The Cartoonist Cooperative‘s Discord were talking about ComicAd Network– a banner bidding and exchange service geared towards webcomics. For those of you who remember Project Wonderful, it’s essentially the same thing with some quality of life upgrades.

What was Project Wonderful?

For those who don’t remember: Project Wonderful was a website where people could pay for ads on each other’s webcomic sites. They were very low cost, usually in the 10-25 cent range. You could bid a higher number to take over an ad spot, or keep yours low for when the higher ones eventually expired. The big appeal was being able to 1) cheaply get many eyes on your comic, especially if a particular webcomic happens to blow up that day, and 2) earn a relatively steady-ish revenue if your webcomic is popular enough. In an era where internet advertising was getting its footing and usually required the work of an ad agency, this became a very critical part of the webcomics ecosystem.

…The way it went under is a story for another post, though. Regardless, I do personally think that webcomics would have moved away from PW as adblock became so ubiquitous that it’s now included in many standard installations of browsers (and even on your phone). The age of banner advertising being a major source of income for, well, anyone, has been over for a long time.

Back to the original point! I started talking about my own strategies in the co-op; it ended up being useful enough that I screencapped for Bluesky and promised to turn it into a more in-depth blog post later as social media is inherently ephemeral and if someone links me to another ~20 post long thread I will [redacted]. Please just get a blog, I am begging you.

My original notes on ComicAd (circa mid 2024)

Here’s the original text (in response to if I’ve found placing ads on CA useful without immediate monetary return):

“I feel like it is! About half of my weekly traffic^ is from ComicAd ads, currently split across four ads. I’m not pulling like 100k a day or anything, but I think it’s been catching on, especially with active webcomic readers who miss PW and being able to find comics easily.

The way I’ve been doing things so far is: looking for webcomics that accept 18+ ads (there’s All Ages, Teen, Mature, and 18+), are mid-range price wise (I don’t have a ton of money, Imao), and are between 100-500 daily views. While it seems easy to go to the BIG ones that get tons of daily views, they’re usually the most expensive. Also a very important thing imo: advertising on comics that actually share an audience with yours. Like one I used to place ads on that had a big return rate really didn’t share an audience at all- my comic is a gay bdsm body horror comic, and theirs was about barbarian women. Both are 18+ but like there’s a very low chance that we share an audience, so spending 0.50/day wasn’t worth it in the long run.

I like cycling out too! Like if readers for a webcomic see your ad all the time they’re gonna ignore it. I wish comicad had a better way to view bid histories so I just try and keep track with bookmarks on there.

^ My current weekly traffic is about 200-300 people with a collective 2,000- 3,000 views and 135 pages of comic available to read. This means ideally each visitor reads about 10 pages of webcomic, which lines up with the described reading habits of most of my vocal readers: usually waiting for a couple weeks to go by and then reading a chunk at once. I post twice weekly and only do a couple week breaks after a chapter ends, of which there have been two. So if someone waits, say, three weeks between reading, goes back a couple pages to make sure they remember where they are, and then catches up to the most recent page that’d be about 6-10 pages.”

This is, for the most part, still correct! Obviously Ultraviolents is rapidly approaching 250 pages now, and some of these numbers have fluctuated, but the general point still stands. I’ve also now found something else that I had suspected beforehand is indeed very true: webring traffic is just as strong, if not more important. Numbers wise, anyway.

Webring Traffic

Several things happened later in 2024: I joined Spiderforest, and I joined Spice Rack. Earlier this summer, I also created the BL Webcomic Webring. The weekly individual referrers (that being the count of individual readers who clicked on the link to my site) from webrings is generally double the referrers I get from paid ads.

Weekly Data:

• Spiderforest is one of the very oldest webcomic collectives on the internet, if not the oldest operational one. The home page leads to a directory of webcomics, and we all have our banners in rotation on each other’s websites with both a banner and a box ad. It serves a very wide variety of readers, but I get about 200-300 individuals a week clicking through on SF banners from other webcomic sites.
  • The page views for this are all over the place- probably due to the random nature of the banners. Not everyone who clicks through from a fantasy comic is going to like horror or is even interested in adult comics, etc etc. There’s a couple of comics that I consistently see click through action from, but it’s still a random chance if my banner ad crops up on a website that nets that kind of reader. (Or if that reader is looking at those banners in the first place- I know I generally don’t notice ads when reading through an archive)
• Spice Rack is primarily a web banner exchange with a directory style landing page. There is a backend for each of us to upload banners that then cycle through each member’s ad box on their website. If a member has a specific campaign or thing to sell, all the web ads will be for that. On a regular week, I get 400-500 individuals from these ads.
  • Page views for this are much more consistent- about 2-3k page views with a longer read time. This makes sense since it’s a NSFW specific webcomic banner exchange and the numbers are relatively comparable to last year’s CA numbers. I’ve also noticed that people who start reading tend to keep reading, whereas others bounce off fast. I think this can be attributed to the very stratified nature of porn comics. I would not expect someone coming from Evil Inc to want to read Ultraviolents.
• BL Webcomic Webring is a ‘true’ webring, in that there is a piece of code that all members put on their websites that allows viewers to navigate in an uninterrupted ‘ring’ of links. This was kind of a dark horse- I hadn’t realized that it was something so simple that people were interested in! I made it in a few hours during Citrus Con this past year, and it nets a consistent 150-200 individuals each week. Pretty surprising for something so simple.
  • Page views are overall less since it’s smaller. But! Readers from here read twice as long as others from any other non-social media source.

Obviously numbers aren’t everything- I’ve definitely got a whole post on me about how people take these too seriously when they should be focusing how to letter correctly first- but I find this kind of thing super fascinating. I haven’t been able to figure out a solid way to see how much of this translates into store orders or patreon pledges, but it does at least reinforce two things:

• Interest based groups, such as webrings, will always be king. This is even more important now with social media fracturing. People don’t know how to find things anymore- anecdotally, when I ask people about how they find new comics to read, the number one consistent answer is “a friend recommended it”. Webrings are the next best thing. If you’re thinking about starting one: make yours as discoverable as possible.
• People read story based comics in 10 page chunks. Ultraviolents, like many other webcomics, updates twice a week. This means readers are catching up once a month- I would love to figure out why this is. Is that just how long it takes until someone has the free time? Do they catch up on a bunch all in one day? Are they waiting for a sex scene? I can’t really slap an easy answer on this one, but the observable behavior is there. A generalized webcomic reader survey may be in order.

Okay So Your Point Is…?

I don’t know if I really have an actionable point here outside of trying to reinforce that people think about advertising their webcomics wrong. You don’t need a tiktok sponsorship, you need community. You don’t need to be posting on every social media platform, you need to connect with your actual audience of readers through their interests. Stop casting your net unsustainably wide and cast it deep instead.