I'mma just rant here, IDK if it's relevant to the current stream of conversation:
I used to do webcomics back when I was in highschool. My first set of comics was hosted on my own website and the only promotion I got was word of mouth from the fandom and general googling. There was no facebook or twitter back then, and nobody used myspace to promotion comics back then. There were a few small networks of webcomic communities online like drunk duck and smackjeeves but they were very contained to those communities. And at the time I was just posted up random one or two page stories of random stuff relating to fandom. I guess the sort of random fangirl stuff you see on tumblr now.
I wasn't aiming for popularity or money then. I wasn't even aware of how many people were reading my comics and coming to my site. For all I knew I had only two readers. And that unknown factor kinda helped. I was making fanart and comics just for the sake of doing it. But updates were slow.
Later on I started getting into those comic communities, just discovering them. I think at the time webcomics were finally starting to break through and I randomly found a community called gutterfly. It was a self hosted site and the comics had to be manually accepted by the site owners. There were a few other sites like this in which they hosted only a handful of comics. I decided to join them after I started what you would call a comic strip, a simple to draw short format thing. I was able to mass make them and auto upload them so it was a DAILY comic strip, which I think a lot of people at the time were trying to do.
Again there wasn't much importance placed on rating or subs then. The only interaction you got was comments and popularity. Popularity was gauged manually, but how often you got comments or talked about on the forums, and if you have a fan base. To be a successful comic artist back then meant you had a fanbase. It wasn't quantified by likes or subs or comments, but if you had an active group of people interacting with you and talking about your comic.
I sorta let that project die after a long while. I sorta just moved on, or the story had changed in my head and I didn't want to continue the old version. And since I didn't have a fanbase I didn't have a reason to keep going.
The first two chapters of my current comic are actually pretty old. Pre cellphone internet old. I hosted it on a few sites, tried to cross post them on different sites. I think I also had them up on DA. But then life got complicated and I had to stop. Social media wasn't like it was now and those sites only really reached people you already knew. So advertising was done on the comic communities.
Now everything is qualified. Everybody measures likes and subs and views. It doesn't even matter if people viewed your stuff and moved on VS being fans. Everyone is just a tally mark to collect.
In general I find that everytime I make an update on the comic that runs now, which is every week, to make a post about it on all the social media (with links). But it's hard to tell if they just like the post there or if they actually went over to check it out. And then you have the people who straight up don't care and just liked or followed you in hopes that you will do the same, and they unfollow you after a few days. It's a battle between breaking away from other creators and trying to get at the consumers.
Even here it is hard. Yes we all want to help and support each other here but in the end we have ourselves in interest. We get stuck networking and advertising to other creators and have a hard trying breaking it over to where all the consumers are.