Hey hi hello! 
Part 1. Spotlight Banner Schedule Changes
Starting in August, we'll be increasing the number of cycles for our Spotlight Banner. Instead of featuring one comic for 7 days, we'll be reducing the feature to 3 days. The shorter cycle will allow for us to feature roughly 10 series a month. With this reduced feature time, we will also feature a series multiple times throughout a calendar year. We hope to create content synergies with this faster paced featuring cycle.
We'll experiment with this for the remainder of this quarter and share preliminary results with everyone.
Part 2. More Long Form Comics in the Daily Snack
As many of you know, I like to experiment with the editorial side of Tapastic. We're home to a great diversity of content and I always want to showcase that within our website and mobile apps. And as you might have noticed, I have quite an eclectic taste.
The Daily Comic Snack via our mobile apps has been driven primarily by short form gag comics. It made a lot of sense during it's introductory phase to keep it as casual as possible because we were seeing such a large influx of new readers. We wanted our initial batch of mobile first readers to get used to the idea of opening the app frequently and commit five to ten minutes a day.
We saw that if a new reader were to open the app consistently for the first three days that they would begin to explore the app beyond the Daily Snack. We saw mobile subscriptions sky rocket from recurring readers. We were seeing exponential growth from mobile readers compared to desktop readers in terms of episodes read per session.
Once we were comfortable with that initial batch of readers, I decided it was time to deviate from only featuring short form funny content. You might have noticed that I've been including a lot more longer form narrative episodes within the snack. Recently, I featured Chapter 1 Part 1 of Heroes of Thantopolis by Strontium (read here45). This is sort of a perfect example of what I'm looking for when featuring long form content.
Chapter 1 Part 1 has 9 pages worth of content. It's a lot but not too much. It gives just the right amount of information - we're introduced to our protagonist, get a sense of the milieu, and it's followed up with a great cliffhanger. It invites the readers to explore and subscribe to find out more. Being beautifully drawn also helped 
The episode performed REALLY well on the Daily Snack.
And for the past two months, I've been trying to integrate more long form content. But the problem lies with some of the formatting on Tapastic. I find it difficult to feature an introductory episode for a comic if it's only a page long. It's tough to give the reader enough context in only one page. As silly as this might sound, I'm really looking for an introductory episode to do most of the following: tell the reader who, what, when, where and why. It doesn't need to hit all of those to get featured, but enough of them. We need to give the reader a reason to subscribe.
This isn't to say that the creators have been going about making their introductory episodes incorrectly so far. This is something that I've only really recently found out through the process of curating and looking for content. But the sooner we make changes, the sooner we can start featuring more long form content on the daily snack.
It's a lot for me to ask.
I reached out to Sixteentons, creator of All Our Cuts and Bruises (read here22) if they were comfortable with compiling their episodes together so the introduction would be longer. More specifically, I recommended compiling the first handful of pages in order to have episode 1 end on that last image with the narrative box tucked away in that corner. The ending to the first episode adds a lot of intrigue and ends on a really poignant note. Plus those last handful of images are just #$%&ing gorgeous.
However, part of my reticence was in the fact that deleting some of their episodes meant losing out on those comments. While you can screencap them, it's just kind of tough to delete them, you know? You lose out on those likes too. Sure, they might be decorative, but they MEAN something.
Which is why I know it's a lot for me to ask and also why I don't do it that often.
However, for every long form creator out there, it's something to consider in the future. And if I reach out to you to make some changes, I'll totally understand if you don't want to. But if you meet me halfway, I think we can start to set a good example for other to follow and establish some best practices for Tapastic.
But yeah... this post got really long, sorry about that.
Until next time,
-Michael from Tapastic
Other "helpful" topics I've made:
-Why No One Likes Your Art117
-How Do You Make Money Off Of Your Art?41
-Where Have My Nipples Gone?47
created
Jul '15last reply
Nov '15- 61
replies
- 8.4k
views
- 31
users
- 165
likes
- 14
links
Frequent Posters
Popular Links
| 117 | Why No One Likes Your Art - Tapastic Forum tapastic.com |
| 47 | Where have my nipples gone? - Tapastic Forum tapastic.com |
| 45 | Heroes of Thantopolis :: Chapter 1 Part 1 | Tapastic Comics tapastic.com |
| 41 | How do you make money off of your art? - Tapastic Forum tapastic.com |
| 22 | All Our Cuts And Bruises | Tapastic Comics tapastic.com |
There are 61 replies with an estimated read time of 14 minutes.
