A computer can't reliably choose high-quality comics and novels; there's far too many interlacing factors that make a series "good" to the audience.
I have a hint of doubt that even human curators truly know what a "good" series is (then again, maybe i'm just being pessimistic.)
I'm making a story webcomic right now, and I wish there was a bigger audience for long-form, story-oriented series. Simply put, it takes a lot more emotional investment and time to get into a story series.
I don't know if it was actually mentioned before but I think that it may somehow solve the problem and it's not like a big problem to introduce to the site.
Leaving the front page aside as it will always promote popular comics (hey, I know that everyone wants to be popular with their comic BUT actually some of the comics have that thing that made them become popular! I've seen people who seek attention but sadly to say that - their comic is just no good, so people won't read them, cause for example the story and art sucks - sorry to say that but I think that someone should even though it's awful - it's true [and tapastic won't list them on the front page cause people actually look for quality comics])I'd like to suggest something that was on Tapastic BEFORE the ad revenue program - that is: when you've been reading a comic in the place where now ads are listed - there were random comics that you could read. And I think that something like the whole: "you liked that story? try to read these too! they are somehow similar but also a different kind of comics!
I mean that maybe a little thumbnails should appear somewhere with random comics based on genre what we are reading at the time. I like visuals so I love to choose to read a comic when it's hidden behind a smartly used icon. Or just looking to read some similar stories, right? Cause we all seek for what we already like and then we find some new good stories to enjoy.
EDIT: And please don't say that creators need to be promoted to get better - I think that we should learn at least basics about making comics/art/science/sport etc before actually doing some kind of work. And by just doing it without learning we tend to make the same mistakes over and over again. People put high hopes in their work, especially if they are young but that doesn't mean that a not good enough comic should land on first page just because it needs some readers to define that. I really don't like when someone do a half-assed job and then complain about it not working how it should. But I also think that many of the good stuff is probably not being seen because of lack of advertisement although Tapastic shouldn't be the only one doing it's job. It's creators work to deal with advertising their own work! Remember that!
I wouldn't call my comic "great" or "a hidden gem" but not a lot of people have seen it hero on tapas.
I originally thought that's what the tags were for and it kind of confuses me that they don't do something as simple as that instead of showing everyone the same comics. For example, if I've shown 0 interest in romance comics but I'm always being shown romance comics in my daily snack that's just a waste of everyone's time. but if they would just automatically show you comics with related tags from the get-go there is a much higher chance of the reader seeing comics they like artists being discovered and tapas getting to profit from it (everyone is happy). to me, it seems like common sense but I'd like to think there is a reason they haven't done it yet.
TL;DR
It's a great idea, it just needs to be executed well. Staff doesn't have the time right now.
Tags are currently not functioning so we just use them to put in gags and other Easter eggs for the hard core fans to look for. At some point they probably will have a use, it just seems very low priority... 2020?
Something far more simple would be just to do 30-50 genres that creators can select on their dashboards. "Romance", "Science Fiction", "Boy Love", "Superhero" etc. Creators get to select up to five per series. Readers select as many as they want or "All". Then their feed is automatically curated to fill based on that reader's preferences.
It all sounds very simple but it's not. It takes a lot of back end work to make this happen and staff already has a to-do list a mile high which is why it's going to be a while before it happens. Monitization stuff that makes the site and creators money are much higher priority and web tipping and coin purchase just got added after months of creators requesting it.
Also the Daily Snack at that point would have to be automated because right now its all done by hand. Someone on staff picks the series in advance and does their thing on the back end. If you start excluding certain things then the Snack becomes very challenging to do. Let's say they pick four things that you're filtering out. So your snack would have only one thing in it?
Also what if a reader only selects "Mystery". How many "Mystery" comics are there on Tapas? The snack would quickly run out of content to provide or it would have to dig deep down into the MS Paint drawn stuff with poor grammar, no story line, and only five subscribers. Staff probably doesn't want that sort of stuff to be featured by the system.
One other concern is that the system could make the community very segregated. If someone selects "Action" only they could miss out on some really great "Romance" stories, and vise versa. How many times have you accidentally stumbled upon something outside of your "likes" and ended up finding something new you enjoyed?
I have a feeling the daily snack, along with many of tapas sales and direct marketing attempts, would override any recommendation system. Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to have a tool like it. However a recommendation system would also, on top of their current marketing methods, allow them to target some direct marketing to the audience that actually wants it. Possibly also get an idea of if a certain genre has readers that are more active during a certain part of the day. If they can figure that out, they can schedule direct marketing targeted at people with those preferences to be sent out at a peak hour so more people see the notification.
Regardless, it's all stuff that takes a lot of back end effort and needs to be done well. If done wrong it can straight up break the site for everyone. Or it could be as shitty as youtube's recommendation system, which heaps of people have done their best to deactivate just so youtube will stop putting toxic or annoying content in their faces. I wouldn't want that for tapas.
And as you said, it's not top priority. Top priority is making sure creators can benefit financially off of the site. It's pretty much been one of Tapas' absolute main goals for a long time, after all. And we should be happy that this is the case, because considering how unlikely the young webcomic audiences are to buy print books or support a patreon, it is the thing that can make or break a creative living for many of the site's creators. It is good for small creators too. The better the revenue tools become, the less popular a creator has to be to make proper income (assuming they are ready to make use of the tools in a profitable way).
I agree with most of what you said but you really think it's ok for them to keep a system where the cherry pick what does and doesn't get to be popular based what they decide is "good content" I get that it's not gonna happen overnight but this reasoning for why they haven't done it yet is the entire reason this discussion is happening right now.
if your reasoning is actually correct then that confirms all of our concerns on this thread. those concerns being that the staff doesn't really care about allowing smaller comics to gain exposure because they want to prioritize the content that they consider is good.
I would like to think this isn't true but if that's the case then the majority of creators on this site would be better off just creating their own site with Wix or uploading it somewhere else and they would probably have a higher CPM as well.
Never have been able to figure out why staff doesn't make CPM a priority. Hiveworks has a $1.25-$2.00 CPM and Tapas is $.08 CPM. Imagine how much happier creators would be if they were earning 20x more from ad revenue. Plus Tapas gets 30% so there's something in it for them as well.
Yeah, that's another thing that I really don't understand. there was another forum talking about why ad revenue was so low but it seemed like their best answer was because there are a lot of creators's on this site or something. That sounds completely made up to me though because there are a lot more platforming sites that have much bigger audiences but still have way higher CPMs like you said.
I think it's just that they haven't been able to create enough demand for their ads because whenever I watch videos for ads it's usually the same 4 or 5 different companies. it would be a different story if they were to take advantage of this real niche market to try and convince advertisers to do business here, just off the top of my head I can think of at least five major companies that would benefit from this market.
and also they could just open up advertizing to the users that are already here because that would literally solve both of these problems at the same time. users can spend on ads to increase their traffic and then everyone would have a higher CPM as demand for the ad space goes up.
but I don't know it must be more complicated than that for whatever reason.
I was just wondering why sites like Tapas and even LINE, don't bother to offer opportunities for creators to pay for advertising. It would make them more money while creators who desire to be on the front page or in a sponsored content section for similar products can have a chance to reach an audience they wouldn't get normally. I also think it would be nice if they created a system where creators can bypass Patreon by offering early access on our comic pages for tippers or the ability to lock a comic behind a paywall to offer exclusives to supporters. If not many people are willing to leave the site to go somewhere else, as it seems hard to get people to leave Tapas or LINE for Patreon then integrate those systems and take advantage of it.
Staff is against creators directly buying ads on Tapas. We've tried to on multiple occasions.
The last inquiry response we received some months ago is that staff desires an equal playing field. The example they gave was if there is an impoverished creator hand drawing a series and posting to Tapas they want them to have the same potential for just as much success on Tapas as a creator with a Wacom and money to burn.
While it's a great concept in theory, how a creator can rise from nothing, with the deck stacked against them, to become one of the most popular creators on Tapas, is that still realistically possible?
Perhaps when Tapas was small and first starting off that was the case, but now? One could argue given how the readership demographic is, what it has grown into, with certain genre having a significant edge, other series have a disadvantage.
Also, considering how the app is currently set up, with many things hard coded in, what staff chooses to feature gets a huge leg up. Take for example the tipping section. It's been static and promoting the same series for many months. If it was dynamic and rotating through whatever series were doing well by the tipping algorithm then yes it would be more fair. Also the fact that the app homepage is mostly about premium content now puts free series at a disadvantage unless they get some sort of feature.
It would be nice if Tapas would allow creators to take out ads on the site in order to counteract some of these disadvantages. Each page has a total of four ad positions plus the Tapas ad box. We're fairly certain most creators would be more than happy to see one box turn into something that promotes paid series if it was paying a higher CPM than the other positions.
However, with all that being said, it's slowly becoming our conclusion that it's all pretty much a moot point, for creators advertising on Tapas that is.
Since Tapas wouldn't let us take out ads we went to their ad provider, Google AdWords to do so. It was a nightmare trying to get ads established on Tapas through Google. But it worked... kinda. Here are the numbers for January:
If you can't see the numbers, we're bidding $.08 CPM which is more than the average CPM on Tapas right now. Some image ads are showing. The issue is the CTR (click thru rate).
The bottom line is the image ad we run on Tapas for a Tapas series is simply not being clicked. Tapas.io is giving a .25% CTR (1 in 400 impressions) vs. the .50% CTR the exact same image ad is averaging across all other locations that Google AdWords is displaying the ad.
The CPC is also significantly higher, $.05 for Tapas.io and $.04 for the mobile app vs. a blended rate of $.028 CPC averaging across all other locations that Google AdWords is displaying the ad.
Data like this has taken a lot of our interest out of advertising on Tapas for a Tapas series even though it would benefit Tapas by keeping creators' money in house vs. taking it to Project Wonderful, TopWebComics, Google AdWords, etc.
Ad revenue is super low because of readers. They largely do not click ads on Tapas, most likely because they ignore them. After all, when was the last time you saw an ad on Tapas? Like your brain actually sent it your consciousness for a moment. "Oh, that's an ad for XYZ." Days? Weeks?
Because of the low click-thru-rates, Google Adwords automatically lowers the bidding for ads on Tapas for advertisers. After all what good is 1M impressions of an ad if no one actually sees it?
Since the quality of click traffic on Tapas is poor, CPMs are poor.
The last inquiry response we received some months ago is that staff desires an equal playing field. The example they gave was if there is an impoverished creator hand drawing a series and posting to Tapas they want them to have the same potential for just as much success on Tapas as a creator with a Wacom and money to burn.
I understand the thought behind it but when visibility is depending more on a daily snack recommendation, staff pick, or premium status I kinda find it hard to believe. It seems to me as if you're stuck at the bottom with a very slow burn to the top without these boosters. At least offering a chance to pay for ad space could give creators unlucky enough to get noticed by the staff a chance to be noticed by the users.
Since the quality of click traffic on Tapas is poor, CPMs are poor.
That's why I try to click on ads while viewing a creator's page to help out. So many people have ad blockers and don't even see ads. Perhaps a good idea would be to force users to turn them off?? Though that could back fire. lol!
A labor-intensive alternative would be to embed the advertising in the content. Like make your characters use a product in a non-canon strip, or personally endorse the product in the description.
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now and it’s so weird to me that “sponsorship” type advertising hasn’t taken hold in the webcomics community like it has on YouTube, in podcasts, and even some good ol’ Fashioned text blogs. The only two comics I can think of that have done sponsorships are Penny Arcade and O’ Joy Sex Toy. And both of those are effectively product review series so they make sense to advertise through.
But other comics with huuuge followings don’t have any sort of sponsorship? I have no idea why. They are podcasts with like, listeners in the 5k range that have sponsorships so why not comics that have ~10k readers?
Maybe if there was enough creator demand for this, staff might reconsider. However, so far, there hasn't been more than a handful of creators who have expressed interest.
Probably because the CTRs w/ ads preform so poorly with webcomics. Why risk the cost of having a creator draw your product into their series?
A podcast it's fairly hard to skip a product placement. If live, you can't jump ahead. If on demand, you can jump ahead in the track, however you risk going too far ahead and have to go back... and it just becomes too much of a chore so for short ads you just listen.
In a webcomic it's just an image that the eye is going to look at for a moment and move on. The momentary impression it makes is not as strong as your favorite podcaster talking about a product for :30 and during that entire :30 your conscious is fully captive to it.
