pinned May 17, '17
A curator is a great idea! My comic never got featured or staff picked but I think I was steadily able to increase my sub count over the last people (sometimes I wonder if its mostly people that mistake my crossdressing comic for BL....)
I have some suggestions for underrated comics22 if anyone is interested please show them some love
I THINK they still curate it by hand? (Someone correct me if I'm wrong) It's just that they only pick from a handful of comics instead of combing through the entire site. Not because they don't wanna promote other comics, but because they just don't have the time to check out every comic episode that gets posted.
which is pretty understandable when your website has around 30k comics. they will really need to hire people to do specifically just that
This is a great idea! The issue is that staff is maxed out. Seriously. Maxed. Out. To the best of our knowledge Michael is in charge of doing the Staff Pick / Spotlight / Daily Snack and he has so much else on his plate that he can't take this on. Or really anyone else for that matter because the majority of the staff at Tapas are busy on the back end handling coding. Who is left? There are only 5 staffers we can think of and Michael is out. So that leaves 4, three of which work exclusively with premium content management because, let's face it, that pays the bills. So only one person is left and knowing what they do, it's not in their wheelhouse. So there's no staff left to do this.
Which means the curator would have to be a volunteer. A webcomic reviewer like @WintreKitty? A moderator like @PotooGryphon? There's almost certainty though that people will complain of creator bias if a creator serves as curator and staff may not want someone who is not with the company doing stuff that reflects on them. What if that curator went and picked all the most violet and controversial stuff on the site to promote? Look what happened with Learning Curves, for example.
So yeah, it should probably be a staffer, but the company can't afford to hire another one right now. So what, do we create a $5/mo. optional creator premium subscription account where creators pay into the curator's payroll?
A social media manager / community manager / curator position in the company would be great. Someone to just handle the forums, @tapas_app / Facebook, and curate content. Since there's no revenue really generated by this, there has to be some way to justify the expense, which is why we brought up the optional premium creator subscription. If just 5% of creators paid $5 a month that would be $60,000 a year to hire someone to take charge of this important but thankless job.
I'm really thinking volunteers. A closed group that invites people in and can vote people out if abuse occurs with a Tapas employee sort of generally overseeing it.
In a small way the winter collabs kinda acted as such. It was a struggle this last years to ensure everyone got into daily snack, however the two years before it helped some creators that aren't always in Popular/Trending get noticed some. (plus a few that are in the pop/trending section, the collab was mixed a bit).
It'd honestly be nice to see more collabs, hosted by other creators, pop up and do the same thing. This could be a way to incentivize Tapas to promote the creators involved by backing their collab efforts(?)
This is something that has always bothered me about this site: it sucks for discoverability. As a reader with a permanent interest in growing his comic library, there's simply no good way to find new comics of interest short of browsing the entire catalog (or random chance, which I think is what most use). At times it frankly seems like the site discourages discovery outright.
As to the popular/trending (let's call them "featured") lists, I don't know the specific algorithm they use but it seems to be largely based on "the comic with the highest numbers (likes/comments/shares) floats to the top". This offers a single viable strategy for getting into the featured lists (maximize those); a strategy which is simply not available to a number of comics, even objectively good ones, through no fault of their own. (Story-driven/serialized comics in particular suffer a lot from this. A system that forces serialized comics versus gag-a-day comics based on views and shares with no weighting whatsoever seems fundamentally broken to me.)
Having comics properly categorized (and measured in ways that make sense to those categories) would be a good start, I think. Curators/volunteers (which I think is a brilliant idea) could certainly help in that regard, in addition to the other things Dave mentions. The algorithm that selects comics for the featured lists should be weighted against the comic's current stats and growth should be a factor in it. (i. e. A small comic that is growing its audience should have a higher base ranking than a huge comic we're all already subscribed to. Seriously, we all read this week's Sarah's Scribbles* already; is it really so bad if it maybe doesn't occupy a space on a featured list for literally days?)
Of course, all this is disregarding the fact that tapastic is no longer strictly a comics platform, which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish I'd rather not get into right now.
*Nothing against Sarah's Scribbles in particular, of course. Just an easy example from the current list.
I like reading lots of different comics on Tapastic, you guys should check out my reading list!17 Haha!
I mean, I feel like I would be more incentivized to be a curator volunteer if it resulted in something positive for me, like money or an extra feature, but for now I do browse on Tapastic a lot and if you are looking for new comics, I can pass out some recommendations. It doesn't solve the problem but it might sate individual's desires for more to read.
I felt that this was more salt again.
It's very difficult to separate money from art. Some people are so focused on getting out there, getting recognition, and making it big that they forget the core reason why they do art in the first place. As much as it isn't fun to create something only to be ignored, the big idea of art is to make a statement about something/reason of existence, using a chosen form or medium, then genre, and finally polishing it to a surface that others can see.
A glass ceiling exists for many creators on Tapastic, yes, but not all the ones who have made it beyond the glass ceiling are these so-called popular comics, or popular genres all the time. Appreciate the webcomics that have breached this glass ceiling, study them, notice which ones don't fit into the popular genre, and think about why and how they managed to get to where they are.
I'm not the expert on art, market economy, or politics. I just happen to work in an art gallery.
if it's unpaid volunteer, maybe they can just curate a bunch of titles, then recommend like 10 a day for the staff to go into daily snack, so the staff doesnt have to go thru 30k comics, just pick a few from curated 10 comics/day
As one of those creators who both writes and draws a comic that for very obvious reasons wouldn't be noticed by senpai, I'm all for a curation of smaller comics that work their hardest to be noticed, but because they aren't boring clones of "Sarah's Scribbles" or "Owlturd Comix" (both of which themselves are boring) already have the deck stacked against them as it is.
It's not a matter of anyone doing anything wrong. There are plenty of great comics that are simply losing because of timing and lack of exposure. That's way advertising is so valuable. People don't know to look for something if they don't know it exists. This ceiling is preventing great stories from finding their audience.
And monetarily this only helps everyone. Tapas wants more readers of their content, then more comics finding their audience will only spread the net of visibility across the internet. It can't remain limited to 20 or so extremely popular series. Following the upper tier can only take you so far if you're buried. There's no negative to having a space for unknown works to be noticed. As an Art Galley owner do you ever hold events for student works?
(EDIT): I added some data above to illustrate my point. Tapas is our platform. So unless there are ads or links to the comics, it's hard for new readers to find small comics.
I am not an art gallery owner. I work in the educational program branch of the Art Gallery. We hold workshops for the public, where we invite a local artist to come in and teach their primary focus. The current gallery focus is on the graphic novel biography "George Sprott" by Ontario-born cartoonist, Seth. We brought in the artist Sean Karemaker to teach an evening workshop on comic making, inking, and panel layout, where he also promoted his recently printed work to be sold at the next VanCaFe (Vancouver Comic Arts Festival)
Generally, exhibitions feature artists that the gallery curator goes out themselves to contact. Often, we'll contact and work in tandem with other art galleries in neighbouring cities so that an artist may visit and not have to leave the area immediately for the next exhibition. For example, we're scheduled to host Germaine Koh in 2018, right after she finishes her exhibition in Kelowna (a couple miles from here). In 2010, she had an exhibition in Berlin, Germany, and did not fly elsewhere. So far as I know, all of the features artists have been Canadian (because I live in Canada). We do our best to feature Canadian artists, and place even higher priority for artists who were born or currently reside in our city, because we need to promote our cultural aspects to the city in order to keep receiving grants.
One good thing about Canada and B.C., is that due to the Canadian Arts Council and the B.C. Arts Council, artists are able to make a living without ever having to sell a single piece of their artwork. The Council ensures so that we galleries must pay the artists a certain minimum fee to have the "privilege" of showcasing their work in our galleries, and we also pay for the opportunity to conduct interviews with the artist. (These fees are at minimum, at least $5000 CAD/3676 USD) In addition, when the artists themselves are at the gallery, we pay them another regular teaching salary to host workshops with the gallery visitors.
I realize I went pretty off-topic.
I probably don't feel as much concern for the lack of exposure that many comics are getting because exposure is not in my own interest.
Collabs are nice but time consuming and sometimes difficult to organize on the creator side of things. Beside creators generally want to focus on the actual production of the comic and taking time away from that slows the release of the actual canonical strips. It also isn't even an option for some small comics and it only helps, yes, if they get promoted. The Tapas employees are busy and thats why I'm suggesting some power to the community much like having Moderators here in the forums. Curators on the actual site.
It does if it means people have more reason to share Tapas through word of mouth. If there's more good content more people will join. A prime example being Netflix who has bombarded their site with content and has lead to a quick rise to the top. We have the content. It just needs to be showcased.
As much as I'd love to volunteer for something like this, it comes down to time and that is something I lack. In a much more basic form, I already do this with my monthly recommendations13.
If people are interested, they can email me suggestions and I'd be happy to look them over and potentially add some smaller guys into the mix. But currently I'm basing these off of the ones I already follow/know, and that is generally limited to more popular stories. These also tend to be the ones that have been around Tapas the longest, as creators used to receive more exposure over longer periods of time when Tapas was much smaller.
If there were a panel of people that chose, similar to what @SaberCow suggested, I would consider being apart of that (and remove my monthly recommendations) dependent on a number of requirements -all of which boil down to how much time I have versus how much time it would take.
In reality, it probably wouldn't be a daily thing but rather a weekly suggestion, since daily comic suggestions would be highly time consuming for a small panel of individuals. If a Tapas staff were to organize this in such a way, I would be very interested in participating where I can.
Again, I want to reiterate that this is a fantastic idea and I really do think it would benefit a lot of creators and readers alike.
I agree somewhat. I think Tapastic's idea is it make us small comic artist work for it. But, giving more recognition to us would be cool.
O_o I think we're talking about two different things.
What I was referring to, is that just because a comic has a higher sub count, does not mean it's more likely to make it to the front page of this site. It's because of the way the Trending/Popular sections currently work.
Let's say comic A has 10,000 subs, and only 1000 out of those 10k people actually read the comic; the other 9000 either stopped reading, or haven't begun to read it, or whatever.
Comic B, meanwhile, has 1000 subs, and every one of those thousand people is actually reading the comic.
Both comic A and B have 1000 people reading it. Tapas algorithm will pick B over A, because A has such a low engagement ratio. B will probably make it to the first page of Trending every now and then. A, on the other hand, will never make it.
That's what I was talking about. Could you clarify what you are talking about? I mean, I agree with what you said in your reply, but I don't know how that relates to the quoted part of my post, so I must be missing something. ^^;;