Ads do work, you just have to have the right targeting and know your demo well, otherwise you end up running expensive, ineffective ads. For example, we found out the hard way that print ads in hard copy indie comic books promoting digital indie comics doesn't translate well.
You also need to have a very large budget.
Probably the poster boy for running ads is James Patterson. Starting off he was nobody and his books didn't do well. Since he was independently wealthy he started running ads, lots and lots of ads. Many readers are... for lack of a better word... sheep and they will follow the herd. Sell enough books and you will end up on the NYT Bestsellers List which automatically means even more books sold.
At one time authors were buying 10,000s of their own copies to end up on the NYT Bestsellers and it would turn into 100,000s of real sales. The NYT has changed things to prevent this but at one time it worked fantastically well. We're not saying that James Patterson engaged in this. Instead he spent millions on ads and eventually he got enough readers that word of mouth carried him on to where he is today. Now he makes $80M/year using a stable of coauthors.
So yeah, ads do work.
Features do work. Just look at the performance of premium titles on Tapas. The thing is premium titles sit front and center for days on end. A Daily Snack gets you 24 hours of attention. A Spotlight gets you 3 days. With Tapas' audience, 24 to 72 hours is not enough time to develop a large enough subscriber base to monetize into anything significant.
Coupled with the fact that you can't ask for a Feature or buy one, worrying about being Featured is a waste of good energy. They're completely outside of your control.
We did manage to get a Feature once through a round about way, via sponsoring a contest just like NC Comix did. But the costs to the contest were large and because the feature lead to a forum post which then lead to the series (staff would not allow a direct link), the subscriber conversion rate was very low. Google AdWords has a much better return.
BTH, the most effective promotional tool we've seen is fan art. It's summer time which means lots of blockbuster movies. Do a widely recognized superhero as a gender bend anime character and slap it on Twitter. Your mind will be blown. Some people will invariably check your Twitter profile out. Some may follow you others may click on the URL on your Twitter profile. We saw one Wonder Woman fanart pick up 5,000 followers (+30K retweets/likes) by giving away the art to a random winner the day the movie launched. Very smart artist.
The reason we don't do this is because our artists charge us for everything and their hours are severely limited since they each work full time jobs elsewhere. It's a choice between either doing a webcomic page or a fan art. It's more important we keep the webcomics going. Plus there's no guarantee the fan art will catch fire.
Quit if making money is your only goal. Odds are 80% your webcomic will be a financial flop. 15% likely you will break even. 5% chance you will be a star. Do it because you love it.
Or change your comics to be completely for the market. Find what is currently popular and duplicate that. After 20 pages or so if it hasn't caught on, kill it and start another, and keep repeating the process until something catches fire.
Very. We use all the tools Google AdWords makes available to target anime and manga readers within the US and Japan only who only use certain keywords in their searches and we also target certain websites by manually entering each one.
The only down side with Google AdWords is your clicks can vary much. If no one else is bidding at your price range you can get 1000s of clicks a day. If there are a lot of bidders willing to pay more per click or impression you will get very few clicks per day. January was a huge month and we got 100s of clicks for as little at $.028 each. Currently there's steep competition and we're paying $.051 for just a handful a day.