Hi
I’m HeadyPigeon 4180, I have listened to feedback on this thread and have decided to edit certain parts. EDIT will appear on anything that was changed or added, I wanted to make the thread better after listening to feedback. Most of it is still the same though.
My comic hit 92 subs in a year and just recently is hit 100 subscribers on Webtoons. From what I have heard this EDIT ok. Not mind-blowing by any means but no doubt a solid first time success. Now I want to say I am thankful for the success my comic has gotten. To be honest after going dead for 4 months between November - February even as I was still uploading. It was a genuinely scary experience which gave me a lot of doubts on this journey. That being said regardless of my Webtoon’s EDIT average success I’m going to say something which well i’m not sure how you’ll take it but here goes. After seeing the high reader engagement Hawk and Flo Adventures gets. On tapas
On Globalcomix
Or really any other site i’m on. Like the Duck Webcomics Which is a page per day left to right site. Where I have a comment on nearly every page.
My webtoon numbers don’t compare at all, You could make the argument that because Hawk and Flo Adventures only has 18 subs on Comic Fury you could argue it performs worst there solely looking at sub count. That is until you look at total views, total number of 5/5s and even the fact it was able to hit popular now. There’s also the fact Comic fury is nowhere near as big as webtoons so getting subscribers is much tougher to do. I make it no secret that this comic’s worst performing site is webtoons. I make sure even your grand parents Pet gold fish know this fact, but why is that?
Well the answer isn’t pretty, it’s clear i’m doing plenty of things right with my series. It’s clear that people on other sites do go for it. So let’s start with argument number 1 for why Hawk and Flo Adventures underperforms so drastically on Webtoons when compared to other sites. The fact the site’s demographic don’t go for it.
That’s a fair argument on a surface level until you realise one thing. It’s not true in the slightest, now i’m not saying Hawk and Flo Adventures on Webtoons would easily hit 1 million subscribers in my life time, but it could find a reasonably sized audience within webtoons and have a solid fanbase. People quote this comic, like ‘Fudge My Juggers’ or ‘I’m Hawk and Flo we’re legendary heroes’ or ‘I’m Homeless I don’t pay Taxes! it could get Similar to something like Nerd and Jock or Hello World, Something around the 40K sub mark.
At the top I showed you my webtoon banner. My Webtoon is 13 months old.
Here’s my Tapas Banner
Wanna guess how old it is? 12 months? No... 11 months? Lower.. 10 months.... No.. Penry the Mild Mannered Janitor? Could be but no. (Sorry couldn’t resist a Hong Kong Phooey Joke I grew up as a big fan of Hanna Barbera xD).
I started posting on Tapas.. In February of this year.
February of THIS YEAR. (Or more precisely January 31st which may as well be February)
The comic is only 4 months old on Tapas and it has 40 more subscribers. Nearly 1000 likes and it bubbles around the top 100 most popular action genre comics on the site. I would have set it to supernatural but it didn’t have it as an option unlike webtoons. I will tell you right now Hawk and Flo Adventures fits Supernatural like a glove. It’s the perfect genre for it, yet despite not being able to go into that or the Adventure genre (Like it can on the Duck Web comics). It trounces the Webtoon mirror by every conceivable metric. So does the Duck and So does Globalcomix the latter of which I joined in January and it already has about 4,820 total views.
Ouch..
So after tackling the site demographic argument there’s the ‘well webtoons is harder to grow on’ Me doing better on Globalcomix and Tapas was because it was easier!... and? why is that in anyway and indictment of what I was able to achieve on those sites? Isn’t that more of an indictment of Webtoons? (EDIT) Possibly but then there's argument number 3
Argument number 3 is the fact that i'm less active on Webtoons than I am anywhere else. It makes sense that the site i'm most active on will be the one I grow fastest on. Which yes you are correct Webtoons is the site I am least active on, I put the least amount of effort into that site so it will be where I grow slowest. That being said here are reasons why I am least active on there:
It's because notifications are broken
It's because you can’t click on people’s names in comment sections to check out their profiles. Because seriously how they haven’t fixed something as basic as that is embarrassing when *gets piece of paper clears throat. EVERY OTHER SITE ALLOWS YOU TO DO THIS!
That has a comment limit?! Why?! Just.. why?
Are reasons why I am less active on it in the first place?
We are artists and writers, the best artists and writers aren’t social media influencers. Lacking a lot of this basic stuff means that in order to get successful on Webtoons you only have 3 options.
You’re a Tiktoker or some kind of social media influencer
You get popular on another site, which is essentially what i’m doing. Though one side effect of this is my readership is very fractured so it’s hard to tell how big my comic currently is for certain.
The site promotes you, in which case congratulations! All of my friends in my friend circle got featured over me. I’m not sure how well it would benefit me personally if the feature came but there is one thing I am sadly certain of as someone who reads a lot of comics and that’s this...
75% of featured comics by webtoons Get outperformed by Hawk and Flo Adventures, solely on the Duck Webcomics and not taking into account other site mirrors. The Duck A small community run site. So do I have some magic form of marketing myself that’s so good I’m able to do as well as a Hidden Gems webtoon with no feature?
No not really...
Was I promoted by Tapas? or Globalcomix?
Again (sheepishly) no The image I showed you of Hawk and Flo on Globalcomix is just the popularity rankings doing it's job.
Then how is it possible?
Well all I do *Looks down at another piece of paper Clears throat. AHEM. Is comment on other people’s comics and if they have different site mirrors. I go leave comments on those sites as well. There really was no big scheme that worked. All I did was just comment on comics. Here’s my total number of comments on comics on Tapas alone since joining in February. I genuinely just want to make people’s day better when I do this, When I drop 100 comments on 1 comic i’m not trying to do it just to get big. In fact it’s a very inefficient way of growing myself.
So... let’s get this straight before my Brain Hangs upside down faster than Joey Ramone in a kid’s playground. Commenting on other people’s comics. Got me on par with 75% of the Hidden Gems and staff picks section?! That’s insane, but it’s a sobering fact. That a person who just goes on other people’s comics and comments on other sites. Is able to promote better than Webtoons itself in the majority of instances. I don’t even have an Instagram I’m not the demographic for social media at all. I’m basically this guy on social media.
On web hosting sites i’m this guy though. Mainly because I have a genuine love of reading comics. I was a comic collector as a kid but kept reading through stuff too quickly. I read and type fast, so as a result I inadvertently carved out a niche as a supportive reader.
Most of the featured section getting outperformed by someone reading and commenting on comics is pathetic and it is not good enough at all. Webcomic hosting sites live and die with people like me. Legacy readers that show up in a dump truck the size of a moon and drop comments on people’s comics to genuinely try to lift people up. Yet I feel like all webtoons does is hate me, somedays I feel like whoever designed webtoons made a psychological profile of me and decided. I want to design this site in a way that will hack off HeadyPigeon Screw that guy. Leaving comments on peoples comics and being a supportive person, I hope they choke. Leaving comments on others comics? how dare that Pigeon not have millions of followers on tiktok and do things the right way! While i’m at it No Notifications! Muhahahaaaa... really? So you want to promote generic comics that are (EDIT) Unoriginal and unengaging for readers? You want in fairness talented social media marketers that likely can’t tell stories? because let me tell you something Pablo Picasso could promote his art and make great artworks but he was a very, very rare exception. Most quality webcomics are genuine labours of love that find their way to fame through comment sections. The best webcomics don’t tend to be made by people with big followings on Instagram or twitter. It’s a very warped way of thinking and it’s going to get the site killed at the rate it’s going.
EDIT: Power Up Comics is an example of something that used the comments section to it's advantage and was able to grow itself, partly through notoriety. There are many popular webcomics that came into being through comment sections. It's mostly how a lot of stuff we talk about today got their start.
On every site I have 1 nitpick that isn’t really that big of a deal. The Duck webcomics is mobile unfriendly. So is Comic Fury at times, Tapas has stupid Guidelines, but I ignore them anyway and just chat to people have have a good time. Globalcomix doesn’t let me see which smiley’s are clicked on my comic (though that’s getting fixed). On webtoons I have at least 5 serious problems!
Whether it’s the atrocious rating system, that allows people to rate themselves 10/10, is located at the top right of the chapter select screen, and is in general stupidly easy to exploit/ rate bomb.
Whether it’s The fact Creators can’t see comments that are left on their comics, which Dear sweet Lord of Bagels how can you be so arrogant that you don’t even have a basic feature that community run sites with no budget are able to get right. Yet Webtoons the biggest and richest site of them all can’t be bothered because they’re lazy, ignorant, arrogant and *Gordon Ramsay has entered the chat
See? That’s how bad webtoons is as a site when Gordon Ramsay shows up in my chat. Though maybe he’s planning on doing a spin off show about reviewing Webhosting sites? I got the perfect name for it. Webtoon Nightmares, and in the first episode he gives up on Webtoons faster than he did Amy’s Baking company. I can picture it now, the social media team doing their job and being nice would be like the nice servers in the restaurants he goes to and everyone else in the business are the out of touch owners or cocky chefs that can’t cook pasta properly. That’s an overstatement though because even then they’d design a better site than webtoons did.
I want to say a few things before this thread ends. I have nothing against the community. I love the webtoons community I truly do and a lot of the genuinely embarrassing stuff Webtoons get’s wrong with it site, I can look past. I have friends and readers that I love talking too. I love chatting with Ashdays the maker of The Giant of Grey water who leaves me comments every chapter. I love Lemon Tree who is subbed to me and I have no idea where They found the comic. I love Poquito Bird who clicks like on Webtoons and Tapas and has left me a fair share of comments. If I had 1 reader i’d be more than happy to update the webtoon, stay on the site and let them read that way. Webtoons was a good place for me to start because I didn’t want to be seen. I needed to learn as I got the hang of uploading stuff online and it would’ve been scary being on the front page in the recent updates section of The Drunk Duck or Comic Fury. So I took my time made 1 chapter and just updated that 1 chapter over and over again until I got the hang of everything. That was a year and a half ago on November 22nd, I needed space and I needed time to learn. I know a lot of people joined webtoons because they wanted to get featured and wanted to get views, likes and so forth. I didn’t, so I guess I kind of got what I wanted.
EDIT: As a creator, as a reader i'm frustrated by a lot of stuff. I accept I mostly live in front of my laptop, but I do have a phone as well and I still get that stupid comment limit. I hate it, it was the straw that broke the camels back and enraged me so much I needed to vent in this thread.
I confess that in fairness to webtoons Ice Cream Truck Of Doom, launched in April of Last year. It was practically in beta with beta readers for The First 4 months of my comics life. It wasn’t really promoted in that time span. Those 4 months were rough, all it was, was ‘help me I suck, i’m trash and I need advice on how to get better as quickly as I can’! and in fairness I did. Looking back i’ve no regrets with my webcomic, I really do feel like I made the best possible decisions that I could have done given my own set of circumstances. Being featured is never going to happen for me. I had to scrap my series first storyline and delete the original, but I don’t need to get featured. I’m good enough, you’re good enough, we as a community are good enough. Webtoons... isn’t good enough. Which is sad to say given I have friends and comics I genuinely love reading on there. I’m happy for the recognition they deserve I just hope that their readers will follow them to other sites and they grow better than they did on Webtoons. That being said i’m still scared for them when Webtoons inevitably collapses.
Which it will because of this:
Now why would a random 100 sub Tapas comic with a small cult audience spell the death of webtoons? Well Nocturne 21 is an example of a comic that like Hawk and Flo Adventures does better on other sites but performs not as good on webtoons, but unlike Hawk and Flo Adventures where the comic’s quality is the same on Tapas, Webtoons, Comic Fury and Globalcomix e.t.c. with Nocturne 21 we have a much, much more egregious reason as to why this is. It’s the fact that the webtoon version of the comic, is the worst version of it by far.
This is because in order to upload as a chapter It had to have the resolution dropped completely, but also it got censored due to webtoon’s censorship guidelines. Bare in mind on Tapas, Nocturne 21 didn’t get censored and the resolution is still at maximum. Now in fairness Nocturne 21 is still a great comic on Webtoons, but that’s like saying the Orange Box is a great game for the PS3 when it’s an embarrassing port of a game that’s better everywhere else. Not just Nocturne 21 has this issue either. Lots of highly polished Manwha’s need the resolution at top shape. I mean admittedly it’s not a problem for me because I draw this. Which was an art style built around animation shortcuts I read about so it could be produced quickly.
It still doesn’t change the fact that readers go where the quality is. At the moment, Webtoons has the lowest quality of all 5 sites i’m on and I say this as someone who actually does check the canvas section. Why would I read on Webtoons when my comments as a reader don’t get seen? Why would I sit through the worst versions of popular comics when they’re better on other sites? Why would I put up with a site that doesn’t let me click on people’s names to check their profiles? Why would I put up with the Garbage Rating system that deserves to burn in the depths of hell? Why would I put up with a search Engine that is so bad that some days that when I type in Huff it doesn’t show up?
EDIT: The part that get's me is this. They put in place a mechanic to get in the way of me trying to be supportive of others comics. I read and type fast, when I go through comics I get into a rhythm I don't like having that rhythm broken up by having to count Mississippi's before I make my next comment. Yet they let 1 page comics abuse the Canvas section as much as they want with page uploads. Comic Fury and Tapas have timers to stop people doing this. Globalcomix has a well laid out front page with lots of sections and a large updates section so spamming updates isn't too busted. On the duck.. well ok that site has some jank involved but at least they don't nerf the comments section.
Why would I put up with a freaking comments limit?! The answer is I don’t for the most part. I just read on The Duck, Comic Fury, Globalcomix and Tapas instead.
