People are going to leave, people are going to join. It's only natural. No website or series has a 100% retention rate. However, as long as more come in than go out, then you are headed in the right direction.
As the graph posted earlier points out, Tapastic is growing at a solid pace and is the 2nd largest comic portal behind Line. Mind you that Line has a massive amount of corporate resources powering it and can run in the red paying their featured artists $24,000 to $80,000 a year. Tapastic doesn't have that and has to be self-sustaining which is why you see it branching out into novels and keys and merchandise in order to create a stable income source beyond ad revenue (which are constantly becoming less and less income generating) and why it doesn't spend huge sums of money on advertising itself (more on the pitfalls of advertising later).
More Creators More Competition:
You can't post to Tapastic alone and hope to be discovered without any further promotional effort. Tapastic has 16,000+ series and adds about 40 more a day, with up to 600 series updates per day. Tapastic is becoming so huge that series are competing more and more for a limited amount of staff attention, meaning it is increasingly unlikely your series will ever receive a snack or a spotlight. You instead have to earn those readers by posting frequently so you stay on top of Fresh and reading lists and push things out to social media such as Twitter. You have to post over and over to prove that you will stick with the series for the long haul. There is no easy button. Even getting staff spotlights these days are not generating the overnight 1,500+ subscriptions like they used to. There is increasingly more and more for readers to read on Tapastic and more and more choice. Ask yourself, when was the last time you subbed to a staff spotlight?
Declining Returns:
To those who mention their series statistically stalling, we have discovered with our own series that growth is rapidly declining. The first posting of the cover alone generated 100 subs and five times on the Top 10 for Trending. Soon it was 20 subs per update. Now its less than 5. We've only been on trending once that we know of in the last 24 updates. It is the law of diminishing returns because the community increasingly is more and more aware of your series and all those who are going to sub have more and more likely done so already. Consequently you need to look outside of Tapastic to grow your readership.
Still Huge Growth Ahead:
But don't give up hope. The reality is that most comic book readers still don't read webcomics. When we polled people at SAGB, only 10% said they read webcomics and of those, only a quarter had heard of Tapastic. But the funny thing was, most everyone knew about One Punch Man. What they didn't know was it started as a webcomic! O.O Readers still are warming up to the concept of webcomics so there is still plenty of growth for everyone in the future.
As a community we should continuously try to educate that webcomics are just as good as printed comics and worth the time investment. When sharing the word, maybe someone might not love your series, but they may love someone else's. So share another series. You never know, the favor may be returned by another creator.
So let's stop trying to be so competitive with each other and instead work as a whole to grow both our own series AND Tapastic. If the numbers are true, Tapastic can easily expand by 10x more readers.
Now . . . About Advertisement:
We had the opportunity to speak with staff back in May and when Tapastic first launched they did a lot of advertising with their start up money. A lot of that advertising didn't generate acceptable returns (enough new readers/creators) so staff has dialed that back and are looking into other promotion methods which we really can't speak of right now. Having spent $10,000s on advertising and publicity ourselves for previous publishing projects, ads (and publicists) can be very sketchy so we want to encourage creators considering ads to exercise extreme caution. Advertisers can distort their numbers. Publicists can overstate their credentials and contacts. For example we had one advertiser say they would deliver a 5% click through rate on 3M impressions (which is out of this world good) and they delivered instead the industry normal of .1%. (Good luck getting your money back.) Some others delivered what they said they would, that a video ad would give 1.5% CTR and it did, but when a site only has 20,000 visitors a day, that is only 300 clicks and you may be spending several hundred dollars for those 300 clicks, many of whom may only look for a moment and then take no further action (no purchase / subscription). On top of that 30% of all internet traffic is bogus bots, so perhaps 200 live people actually clicked your ad. At a 10% conversion rate, is 20 subs worth $200?
So really be careful with advertising.
