Totally agree with 1.), it's too bad there aren't better on-site avenues for visibility Webcomics sites are so oversaturated with stories as is, that even searching by genre typically brings up the most popular stories in each genre. And as you mentioned, Fresh is rather unreliable (and yet the only foothold brand new creators have. Eventually when you get rolling a little bit you can start appearing on trending as well, which is a step up).

However I don't agree with this bit:

It's absolutely more of a benefit to take those extra steps to help promote your content xD If the host site's not going to do it for you, it's up to the creator to promote their work as best they can, imo. You say as much when talking about DA:

^ this rings universal, no matter the site imo.

For example a lot of those "what am I doing wrong" threads, I check out the person's comic and they only have like 20 views per update. Often I find out those people haven't been doing any outside promotion and have just been uploading / relying on fresh to build viewership. I'm no super star myself, but after uploading for only ~2.5 months I've been able to net 200ish views per update, but I also spent 30-60 minutes every Sunday throwing out update notices and promo material across various social medias/etc. A few likes on FB/Twitter, handful of hearts on Insta, couple of upvotes on reddit, all contribute to my comic's overall success. In short, definitely gotta pick up the slack left behind by the website not promoting you

Lastly, I do think it'd be really cool if something like DA groups existed! It's been a long time since I've been active on DA, but those were always my favorite part! Like... Tapas does have some collection folders, but they're solely staff picked and thus mostly just include more bundles of already popular content Also like recently with inksgiving, I totally appreciated them accepting promo strips from anyone who submitted one! But at the same time, the collection on the front page only had premium creator's strips (I think?) Everyone else was dumped into a hard to find collection on the community tab of the app, and even then the thumbnails were broken (didn't match up to the right comic, and would often load 4 or so and just put them on all 20ish strips) so they were hard to browse lol. It would be nice to be able to make some custom groupings and such (as well as easier to find. I don't think you could even access that community inksgiving folder from the website version).

I've always been of the opinion that looking outside of comics is the best way to get eyes in your work. The problem with people frequenting sites like this is that there's so much more competition. When you're reaching people on non-art or comics specific spaces, you have a lot more potential to catch the attention of people who aren't already getting bombarded with new comics they have to read.

I have never posted on a site like Tapas or Webtoons without having been paid to because I know that's not a very efficient way to find new readers.

A lot of people fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between comics and art hosting sites like Tapas, Webtoons, and Deviantart and the people who post to them. These sites aren't here to give YOU the exposure, you're here to give THEM enough revenue to keep the site going. They're relying on YOU to bring in the new people. They're not working for you, you're working for them.

That's why featured folks on Webtoons are USUALLY people who already have well established followings. I know that's the reason I got featured on Webtoons.

You're thinking more along the lines of DA as an art hosting, gallery, and social site. Tapas and Webtoons is NOT a gallery or a social site.

I must also emphasize that it has NEVER been easy for the little guys anywhere. As much as people complain and moan, everyone struggled from the very bottom at one point, yet everyone will EVENTUALLY crawl their way up. Some take more time than others, but we won't stay little guys forever. I don't understand what's with the entitledness of new creators who expect success and attention right away. Yes, it hurts that not many people recognize the fruits of your labour, but everyone has gone through it too!

Please think of Tapas not like Deviantart, because they are different concepts and different sites.

I think the comment on groups is a good thought! That's also the reason I keep advocating for a more robust tagging system here on Tapas. Giving creators the power to make their own categories would make a system where it's much easier for readers to find "more stuff like this," and easier for creators to find (or create!) the categories relevant to them and add their work to those categories where readers can find it more easily.

There's nothing really stopping tapas folks from making groups, though!! - like, creators could easily get together with other creators to promote each others' work -- I know I got a pretty decent number of eyes when another Tapas creator linked to Runewriters in their comic's header! Lots of comics outside of Tapas have groups where a bunch of creators of a similar genre or quality join forces and have a rotating ad on each others' websites to advertise each other, and occasionally participate in events together, and promote each other -- it seems like it wouldn't be too much harder to set something like that up between Tapas creators.

The thing that makes this stuff tricky, always, is quality control. Deviantart is a good example -- how many people actually set it up so that they see whatever random thing was most recently uploaded2 on the front page? The quality of work displayed when you set this as your homepage SINKS (which, incidentally, reflects on website as well -- how long would you, as a reader, stick around on a site where the entire front page was amateurish scribbles?)

So realistically, you don't want it to be open season on the front page; most readers don't want to dig through a bunch of comics that nobody liked in order to get to the good stuff that other people enjoyed, just for the sake of being more likely to encounter a diamond in the rough. Sure, you want people who are doing good work to have a chance at being noticed when they're small, but you also don't want to display Literally Every Small Comic or else the overall quality suffers, and then no reader is gonna check out that section. Again: Readers WANT websites to display the good stuff prominently and weed out the bad stuff. Most of them don't WANT to dig through the bad stuff. If you make a section that doesn't weed anybody out, then no reader is going to use that section and therefore it doesn't do creators any good.

You could argue that popularity isn't a perfect measure of goodness, and you'd be right! There's plenty of comics that aren't popular yet, but are good! But then, the only way to pick those out is to have some kind of juried process, and often, the staff of places like Tapas is simply not big enough to have a whole bunch of regularly, thoughtfully handpicked up-and-coming comics. And a process like that is always gonna have its own biases, and its own frustrations, from being a fallibly human endeavour.

So I really think that the most effective answer is for creators to look for ways to set up the kind of services they want or wished for among themselves, rather than trying to get them from the hosting website! (note, too, that when creators band together and make things like this on their own, sometimes Tapas staff will reach out to highlight and promote it -- the Holiday Collabs in the past are a great example!)
Quality control is going to be an issue here, too -- if you just promote literally anyone who asks you to promote them, then sooner or later your recommendation has no worth, and readers won't listen to it. And many folks with comics that they're proud of aren't going to want to display images or links to work that's at a way lower level of polish and care. But comic creators could make apply-to-join groups that promote each other regularly, where any creator could apply to join and the rest of the group could determine if the newcomer's work is up to par, and accept or deny.

There's definitely some interesting thoughts here -- the trick is to figure out the most feasible/effective way to implement those ideas as creators!!

Looking at Tapas as a system, the total reader-base only has a finite amount of attention to give to the thousands of creators here. The industry is competitive, so of course it's going to be hard to get noticed; that's not Tapas' or any other platform's fault, it's just the way it is.

Also, Tapas does need to promote the "big guys" to a certain extent, since, you know, they're a business. They make actual money off of promoting premium series and incubator series, but not off of promoting any random smaller series. And we can't blame them for that either.

If there's room for improvement, then, I think it's in more efficiently matching readers to the content they most want to see. Readers' attention is a finite resource - you can't just make more of it, and Tapas can't afford to just redistribute it from the larger creators to the smaller creators - but you can find ways to efficiently direct that attention to the right places. As far as I can tell, that would mainly involve increasing the number of genres and/or improving the tagging and search features.

They could go a step further with a spot on the front page or in the fresh section that automatically picks comics/novels at random. It could change daily, or even hourly, giving everyone a better chance to be seen.

A more robust and searchable tagging system wouldn't go amiss. something that can parse multiple tags and sort the ones that tick the most boxes before the most popular. like if one a whim I wanted something that was a dark fantasy with strong GL elements it would be nice to be able to sort by that. The amount of content is much less of an issue when you have an excellent search system.

However I do agree most readers will be gained through external sources - if your comic is good enough you might be able to work with a small time blogger or youtuber that is involved with similar content - IE someone you'd not actually be competing with and who's viewers would be more likely to translate into subs if they were to give a personal recommendation. Could even consider promotional videos or articles and pay slightly more than they'd see from other ADs on average. So long as its all disclosed and all parties are open and honest about it there shouldn't be an issue. it could be a win-win.

Find other content creators in your genre who are not comic creators themselves and make connections. A small time blog might even host your comic for free because hey its additional content for them and promotion for you.

Oh no, I wasn't saying there was an excuse not to innovate (the bottom part of my reply was all about how I loved DA groups when I was active there and would be happy if something similar popped up here!) But this portion:

Sounded like advice for smaller creators to not bother promoting because there's no point? It may be that i misunderstood But then later when speaking on DA you say that it's up to people to self promote there... so i was just pointing out that it's important to do regardless the platform you post to ^^

I believe we're on the same page tho, self promotion is important and expected, but it would be nice if there were more options on tapas to find smaller creator's content!

the thing with this is, its simply necessary business practice. tapas need to promote their most popular and paid content to get their money back

buuut

THIS would be a great solution; the frontpage as-is stays in place for users who arent logged in, when u log in the top of the page is home to ur algorithmic recommendations. im 100% in favour of a youtube-style algorithm, buuuuuut

tapas is still a very small company. i dunno how much work setting up an algorithm like that would take?

so while we can hope and ask for it, it might be a long time coming (although i imagine it is in the game plan somewhere)

the dA group system is interesting - but how would it work on tapas? wouldnt it be more beneficial to just promote your tapas page on dA?

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comics feed fits that need, although its only for trending comics and its all the way down the bottom of the page

while i agree its a really good way to give ppl quick looks at a comic, its also like, forced spoilers. and ppl can always click on a srs to flip through it, like youd pick up a book to flip through.

personally i think that - like your dA groups idea - more curation options would be a good idea. theyre implimenting more categories and doing staff picks and the occasional reader picks these days, so maybe making that bigger and more frequent could be a boon. maybe giving each tapas user a way to create a feed of recommended comics?

honestly, i dont rly know what the solutions are to make tapas a better place for visibility and audience growth. but again i think the algorithm thing is a really good long term goal

see, while this is a really great function, i feel like its part of dA being more forum-like than tapas? and the groups youre describing sound a bit like the curated categories we already have

but maybe we could use dA as inspo to expand those curated categories - maybe certain users are given a curator role (i think this has been talked abt before?) and they set up the categories, and then theres a process of applying to join a category via that person. and then readers could subscribe to category feeds?

it could be really cool, but wed need to tweak the dA model a fair bit to mesh w how the site works imo

I think a relatively good amount of problems would be solved if they had the newest uploads list right below the banner instead of Premium comics while also curating to the genre you want but this could only work with a rating system, which brings a new plethora of problems

Every time the conversation of visibility comes up, this is what I always come back to as well: TAGGING. Get a decent tagging system! Algorithms can't magically lock on to what you want, they need to pull from lists of data, and that can't even start without defining some basic attributes per series. We should be able to search by niche and rating and completeness. Until people can come to the site and have a way to find the kind of story they're looking for, they're always going to gravitate toward what's just on the front page, because stumbling blindly through tens of thousands of series just isn't practical.