Dissonance between views and subs

[xaviersaxonart]

At the risk of making this another "How do I get more subs?" thread, I was wondering how there can be such a dissonance between the views on my comic (1.2k) and the subs (3)?

Looking at other comics with similar view counts, they seem to have significantly more subscribers (or regular readers). My main suspicions for why this might be are that I promote my new updates on twitter, and people from there (who may not have Tapas accounts) end up giving views to my page without subscribing. It also could be because my comic has a more traditional layout that isn't necessarily suited to mobile, which is where most of the users are. The last possibility is that my comic simply doesn't have a compelling hook yet.

Has anybody experienced something similar? What are your thoughts?

Thanks

[darthmongoose]

Okay... so there are a bunch of possibilities that can cause this.

1. A lot of people saw your work on Tapas, but very few were interested in subbing. This doesn't mean your work is bad. It could have just been seen in the wrong place, like you got a feature in a category that wasn't a good fit for your comic (it happened to me when I was part of the Tapas Easter Egg Hunt event last year. Lots of people viewing my comic who weren't interested in subscribing, they just checked he first page, found the egg and left to find more eggs because there was time pressure).
2. A bunch of people are using RSS feeds or your social media posts to follow your comic rather than making Tapas accounts to use Tapas notifications, so your subs don't accurately reflect your audience. This isn't too uncommon if your readerbase skews older and has a lot of people who read on desktop computers because that's how they've always read webcomics.
3. Somebody did a shoutout about your comic somewhere, or wrote a review about it and a bunch of people followed the link to look at it, but they weren't the sort of people who'd actually be readers, they just wanted to see what the person was talking about.
4. You have a small number of readers, but lots of pages and those readers are reading and re-reading and refreshing because they're super-hype for your comic.
5. You have an amazing cover or advertisement for your comic, but it doesn't accurately reflect what the comic is about or what it reads like, so the ad is really effective at getting clicks, but people are disappointed by the comic itself that doesn't seem to reflect that ad. OR as you said, the comic isn't comfortable to read on mobile, so they see your art and are like "oooh!" then when they see the comic they go "I can't read this." (Your art is really good, but your text is pretty small... this one could be the case, unfortunately)

[xaviersaxonart]

Thanks for the in-depth response! Ultimately I do think it's likely some mix between 2 and 5. Not sure how I'd remedy that other than moving the comic to a site that's more likely to garner desktop readers. Could also think about reformatting the pages and moving the panels around so they're better suited to the infinite-scroll format, showing one panel at a time.

[darthmongoose]

Well, a nice thing about Tapas is that it has no rule on cross-posting your comic to other places, like other comics platforms or a website, so building a site using something like a wordpress template, or cross-posting somewhere like Comic Fury or The Duck, which are smaller, but have audiences that skew older, are options.

You could try seeing if you can make a Tapas-friendly version by trying to make the speech bubbles and text bigger (not always easy, depends on how much space the art leaves you with), or like you said, putting the panels large and in vertical format, which would also work.

[powerplantanimations]

I'm almost reaching 50,000 views and I have like 285 subs. I think people are catching up with my comic? I know a lot of them are very committed which is FANTASTIC.

Anyway that's why I don't like sub 4 subs. They just leave the sub and like... that's it. They don't come back. It's just best to build a committed audience imho.

[xaviersaxonart]

That's encouraging. I guess having readers is more important than subs at the beginning to some extent, since it means people are actually seeing your comic, rather than just subbing because you asked them to.