Yeah, it's getting pretty hard to get anywhere. Our novel isn't getting any interest at all despite updating daily to stay atop "Fresh". It has 45 subs and declining. Most episodes have 15 reads, indicating most of the subs aren't even reading. It's a shame given how many hours of writing and research went into it. Watching ads on the app would have probably been a better way to spend those hours vs. writing something.
Our webcomics are doing better but things have really slowed down there as well despite one of them increasing to two updates per week (3 pages a week total between the two). We started advertising to bring in external readers in order to try to keep growth going since internal readers seem to be limited.
The best explanation we have is that there is a proportionally greater number of new novels and comics pouring every day into the site than new readers. New content is out pacing new readers. For example, 10% more new comics and novels but only 5% more readers per month means that there's less readers to go around for everyone. Though this is only our observations and they may be flawed without having access to hard data.
We were really hoping that tipping would go somewhere. Things looked great in January. Now its completely dried up for us (we're at 10% tips of what January brought in). The newness of watching ads has waned and the ad network has become stale. All we see now is Crackle ads which is 4 ads for 24 coins. GSK ads paid as much as 60 at one time back in December. It takes about a minute to effectively earn $.02 or $1.20/hour. Our time is too valuable to make Crackle worthwhile any longer. It's probably the same for many.
