[Answered] Advantages/disavantages of having a Tumblr mirror for comics?

[a.g.meade]

Hey everyone!

I recently learned that posting comics on Tumblr is a thing, and I wanted to see if anyone has experience with this (either as a reader or a creator). Mainly, I'm curious about the advantages or disadvantages of having a Tumblr mirror, or if there are any pitfalls to be aware of.

Thanks in advance!

[rajillustration]

If you do page format, you can make it look like a nice customized home page for your comic. I know a bunch of artists do that, and that's why they like tumblr for it--not necessarily for the sharing, but because it's easier to organize and post stuff than make a website from scratch.

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

I have my comic mirrored on Tumblr, actually. I've only just started, so it's hard to say for sure whether I've run into any upsides or downsides yet, but I CAN say that I've been on Tumblr long enough to have a modest but respectable following, which means I have another platform to promote on somewhat effectively. At the moment, I have the same number of subscribers on my Tapas comic as I do on my Tumblr (6 each), so it seems to be working so far.

[a.g.meade]

@rajillustration - Thank you! That definitely makes a lot of sense. I'm not HTML savvy at all and want 0% of building a site from scratch.

@scarlet_cryptid - That's really great to know that it's possible to build a following on Tumblr. Thank you for your insights!

[Llyrel]

Pros:

• Easy to customize. There's a webcomic theme you can use, which you can customize with your own colors/graphics. Pretty similar to what you can do on ComicFury, with the main difference that Tumblr themes usually will also let you customize parts of the layout (colors, font and link colors, background,banners and so on) with a "what you see is what you get" type of interface, while on CF the great majority of customization has to be done in html and/or CSS.
• Tags make your posts easy to find. Unlike Tapas, where episode tags do literally nothing, tags on Tumblr actually make it easier for your work to be found. Unless the site decides to shadowban you as it did with me, but that's another issue, I guess anyway, make sure to know which tags work best to make sure your work gets seen and put extra care on your first 5 tags: apparently, they're the ones that truly matter to the site.
• Reblogs are amazing for free promotion. If you get reblogged by the "right" user (aka, someone who has a huge readerbase) chances are your post could become pretty popular and more people will check out your blog. That isn't really a thing on Tapas/ComicFury/Webtoon and it is still truly one of the best features about Tumblr.

Cons:

• Tumblr staff. I swear I've never seen a staff that's so dead set on killing its own website like the Tumblr staff is. Every single new feature they've implemented since the adult content ban has done nothing but break stuff that used to work perfectly and added little to no improvements to the site itself.
  Links to external websites? You can still post them, but your blog might be shadowbanned and not show up in search. So basically forget about linking to your Patreon, Redbubble, Gumroad or whatever. Oh, and even if your link is somehow NOT censored, Tumblr now adds url shorteners to your links that might be recognized as "potentially dangerous" by either your antivirus or by browser extensions such as uBlock Origin (gotta love how they did a whole campaign to ban Ad.fly and similar links from the platform because it was dangerous... only to add their own dangerous url shorteners to each and every link).
  Custom layouts? They're one of the key features of the website, but people are apparently getting banned from the site now for using them.
  Comments? We somehow managed to get them back after there was a HUGE uproar when the Tumblr staff removed them, but you only have a VERY limited amount of characters you can use and they're hardly useful for in-depth conversation (also, tags in replies only work once in a blue moon and people WON'T be notified of your reply more often than not).
  The bots taking care of adult content? Sometimes they'll still flag completely innocent posts and then... good luck having an answer from staff. Once I had a post of mine flagged, sent an appeal about it... and absolutely NOTHING happened. For a year and half. Wrote staff multiple times about it, all I got in reply was a bot telling me to "send an appeal". Yes, I KNOW, that's exactly what I did, but you did nothing. Which brings us to the last point: contacting staff about any issues you may have with the site is basically useless. 9 times out of 10, you'll end up talking to a bot which suggests you to do the same exact thing you already did... and even if you get an actual human to answer, their reply is usually something along the lines of "whatever, deal with it". (YES, I'M STILL SALTY, TUMBLR)

• Reblogs are forever. Once somebody reblogs your post, you completely lose control over it. If you delete the original post, reblogs won't be deleted with it. If you edit your post (e.g. by updating a page), reblogs won't be affected, so you'll have old versions of your pages circulating on the website forever, unless you ask each and everyone of the users who reblogged your post to delete it. This can be especially problematic if your work ends up getting picked by a publisher, 'cos they may ask you to delete all pages that were posted online, but... if they've been reblogged by a Tumblr user, you won't be able to. Pillowfort is much better in this sense, 'cos any post you delete will also delete any reblogs of it, buuuut... the userbase isn't nearly as big on there, the site is still in closed beta and the layout isn't as customizable as the Tumblr one.

[a.g.meade]

@Llyrel - Thank you so much for taking the time to write such an in-depth response. I really appreciate that!

As good as the pros sound, it sounds like the cons are... pretty significant. I hadn't heard about the shadowbanning, the bot admins, or especially the reblogs. And that's crazy about the custom layouts getting people banned too! Goodness. I'm sorry to hear that your experience was problematic; a year and a half of appeals sounds incredibly frustrating! Did you ever get the issue resolved?

Secondary question - Would you recommend ComicFury over Tumblr as an alternate mirror?

[Llyrel]

You're welcome yeah, the platform has been... kind of a mess, lately, at least from my point of view. Which is a shame, since I've been on there for 11+ years and used to love it there. Most of my issues with shadowbanning were with an account I created about last year. I guess the staff decided it was a "spam account" because I was linking to my external blogs/websites (as I'd been doing for years on my other account), but even after I contacted them and told them that I was not a spammer, they still did nothing about it. And then I started to have the same issues on my 11+ years old account too, so I decided to call it quits. As for the flagged post... nope, the post was still flagged when I eventually decided to delete that blog altogether, so it never got fixed -___- the only "fix" I could find was to repost the page as a new post and backdate it to make it show in the correct order.

As for ComicFury... yussss, I'd totally recommend it! Mind you, the userbase is not nearly as big as that on Tumblr, as registered users on there are mostly comic creators rather than readers and there is no ComicFury app, making it more difficult for people on mobile to access your comic (unlike Tumblr/Tapas/WT), BUT the customization options are amazing and you can make really cool website, getting on the homepage is super easy (the site shows by default recently updated comics instead of popular ones), views tend to be higher (to compare, I have 14k views on CF and 3k on Tapas) and there's WAY less censorship about adult content (with a bunch of pretty in-depth tags you can use to specify the kind of content you make) the forum is pretty nice too!

[arxianfall]

I went away with the porn.
This topic itself surprises me. I didn't know tumblr still had a userbase.

[Llyrel]

It's nowhere near as big as it used to be in 2012, but some survivors are still there :'D only problem is that, as far as I could tell, they mostly seem to be interested in fanart. Which is a problem I forgot to mention, now that I think of it.

Original art does have a chance to get seen... but overall interaction will be much, much lower compared to whatever you can get on fan art. I mean, just compare this nearly finished, almost fully rendered WIP of my OC Nigel I posted all the way back in 2018, with this extremely rough WIP of Julian from The Arcana I posted last year. The first one has 9 notes, the second one... 162 XD

[azzy-m]

As someone who's read comics on Tumblr for a while now (mostly like fancomics), I can think of some:

Pros:

• Theme can be specialized for your comic due to how themes work. You can code them yourself, or you can search for one online.
• Tumblr can accommodate about 10 photos in one post I believe? And you can actually hide a lot more under the "Read More" if you don't want your posts to be too long, so it's pretty convenient if you have a page format.
• Tagging system is great. Seriously, I think Tumblr has one of the best tagging systems out there. I still get notes for art I did three years ago. You can even go on the search bar of a blog and search up every post in that blog under a specific tag (so for example, on your blog, you have a tag for #my art, you can search that tag on your blog and find all of your art posted in that blog).

Cons:

• If you've got an 18+ comic, you're out of luck. Your comic would get flagged (and if you're really unlucky, even your SFW stuff could get flagged too based on what I've heard of how buggy the NSFW detecting bot is). Llyrel pretty much summed it up.
• 10 photos in one post. Yea this is a con, but for vertical scrolling creators this time. As someone who works in that format, I know firsthand how many files a single of tose bugger episodes create once you split them, and I know 10 photos in a post is not enough lmfao. This is probably why the comics I read on Tumblr tend to either be in page format or very short, not-really vertical scrolling but it kinda is kinda way.
• Can be confusing for 1st time readers. The way Tumblr blogs tend to work is that they start off at the most recent post, so if you've got a lot of pages... well yea. Authors tend to go about this issue by including a "Next | Previous | First" Hyperlink at the bottom, which kinda leads me to my next point....
• Can be frustrating to maintain, because you pretty much have to go through every one of your previous posts and add a hyperlink to your next page every time you post, and you probably also need to make an archive of some sorts containing all pages and extra content that readers can easily access and navigate, meaning regularly updating it, and having to go through huuundreds of posts and yea.
• Can be pretty hard to be visible there. Tumblr is a great place for artists to post through its layout, but sadly it's one of those sites that it can be hard to get any following for unless you make fancontent (which is par for the course for every social media site imo), my original art gets like 2 notes, but the fanart I've made over the years still keep getting like, 20 notes. Seriously the dumb fanart I made for Brawlhalla in 2018 still keeps getting notes

hehe just wanted to add on to Lyrel's list, as someone who's kinda used to reading comics on tumblr. Tumblr may be a hellsite, but it's not a bad place at all to post comics tbh. I don't really post on Tumblr anymore, haven't since like, last year? So I dunno. Take with a grain of salt ig.

[a.g.meade]

@Llyrel - Agh, that sounds like a real mess indeed. Very sorry to hear that it went south like that, but it seems like you've found some good alternatives. Thank you or the information about ComicFury - I'll have to give them a closer look. That's pretty great with how customizable it is!

@azzy-m - Thank you so much for explaining how the tagging system works and for the additional insights. I had very little idea about the tags, so that's really great to know! And yeah, it does seem like fanart is a requirement in order to get any kind of visibility, which is a shame since there's so much great non-fandom work out there. But good to know that it's not a terrible alternative mirror - maybe just one with a lot of caveats.