I've always found it so funny that none of the comics on the tipping banner are in this section. XD
The art was done by a non Tapas staffer which is why it features series that are mid lists rather than the most popular.
8 days later
I hardly ever looks at the Tapastic homepage, but it's interesting how the Trending section's been moved further down.
2 months later
soo....nothing new happened over this subject right?
i still see the same comics being featured all the time.
The daily snack is a push notification Tapas sends out daily around noon your local time zone. It features 5 to 6 episodes, usually many of them premium series to help boost key sales.
At one time we were actually keeping records on what free series were getting featured in the daily snack. After we voiced some concerns that the same series were being featured too often (e.g. GamerCat received 5 daily snacks in two months) staff made a more conscious effort to try to feature things that have never been before including B&Ws, long form, and non gag-a-day.
There is no way to submit yourself for the snack. You have to be noticed by staff and they decide whether or not put you in. In the past, we've tried nominating other series by creators we like, with little success.
Ultimately after about 13-14 months since joining Tapas, and raising concerns about repeated series, we received our first snack (nominated by an intern! Thank you intern!). We incorrectly thought that it would create a huge following for our series. The impact was not as meaningful as we had hoped. The snack only generated 14k views with the vast majority of the readers reading only the one featured episode and nothing else in the series. It also generated 921 subscriptions, many of which dropped off in future updates.
At the end of the day, while a snack is nice, it's not a cure all for a series that is having a hard time gaining a following. We've had three snacks to date, two spotlights, and we're standing at just over 7,200 followers. 
As @Elgenar points out, a lot of people are skipping past the Tapas homepage, so spotlights don't have the same impact that they used to. We jump right to the creator dashboard so we're just as guilty.
Tapas reports approximately 2M monthly users. SimiliarWeb reports approximately 10M website visits. So this means that the average desktop Tapas user is only visiting about once per week. A spotlight only runs for three days and a snack for one day. This is why they aren't having the sort of positive impact that you would expect it would.
We wouldn't get too excited about trying to chase down a daily snack feature. It's just not worth the anguish.
The snack is largely ignored by many. The app boasts 75,000 daily users, but on our first snack we only received 14,000 views for the entire series. This indicates that there is a very low read thru rate on the snack. When was the last time you looked at the snack? We haven't for months because it's just not relevant content. Since we don't read romance, which makes much of the snack non applicable to us. We have a feeling that many others feel the same way. Staff should consider looking into letting readers set content preferences to make finding things easier and the daily snack more meaningful to the individual. This would most likely dramatically increase the read thru rates. Unfortunately this would require a massive amount of coding and we're not anticipating this happening any time soon.
As @ilustrariane points out, the few times we've looked the snack the last few months, the content appears to be highly repetitive. We stopped keeping snack records in 2017 so there's no way to quantitatively confirm this, it is merely an observation.
In our experience the best way to increase views is to look into running ads for your series. TopWebComics offers a $1/day sponsorship which is hands down the best $1 you can spend on ads anywhere. Google AdWords does cost slightly less per click, but the time investment to learn and use the system makes it where you need to have a large spend to make it worth the extra effort.
Hopefully in the future we can share some way to rapidly increase series growth, but right now it remains a very allusive creature.
Unfortunately only 2.5 to 3.0% of subscribers will support a series financially. So 7,200 * .025 = 180 print copies, which is far below the 1,500 copies to make a print run viable.
Also, we're paying our artists per page, and advertising heavily, so the losses are becoming quite substantial.
Oh! I understand... maybe Im being too innocent, but, have you tried patreon or ko-fi to help with printing costs? I noticed many people on Tapas are more inclined to give this kind of support to their fave creators! 
I think it's been like three months since I read the snack thru. I look at the first one sometimes and guess I won't like the rest since they're themed similarly for the promotion. I actually haven't subbed to much of anything recently. Think I might have just leveled off where I'm happy with my library and aren't looking for more.
Patreon would be a good idea if we created the art directly. Since we don't, it's hard to create all the bonuses you need to offer to people to get them to subscribe monthly. The cost to commission the bonus content would likely outweigh the pledges generated.
We haven't looked into ko-fi much, but it appears similar to just tipping on Tapas, which largely hasn't caught on with readers. Admittedly it's a lot of work for readers to try watching ads at 12 coins ($.01) each. At 120 ads per hour that works out to $1.20/hr. It's just not a good use of reader time.
YouTube charges advertisers $.10 to $.30 per video ad view so not sure why Tapas is only getting paid $.01 per view by its ad network.
Have you tried making tipping incentives? And not just making them but actively changing them up/adding new ones? I was experimenting with a monthly semi-customized badge that I would post to the top 10 tippers walls. Other folks offer exclusive minicomics/spinoffs or other art, or use tips as an alternative payment method for the digital content they sell on gumroad (or similar places).
On Ko-Fi I use their goals system as sorta a soft-kickstarter for new zines/spin off comics. Every $10 and I make a new thing, and the people who donate get a thank you. (this hasn't really worked out yet because I haven't had a good opportunity to promote/explain my system. However I did a reader survey and of the people who responded, donating through Ko-Fi was a prefered method of supporting compared to Patreon & Tipping on Tapas. I suspect this is because my audience is a bit older, and has more disposable income than disposable time.)
Could it be because Tapas is taking a cut from the ad revenue before its delivered to users as coins? Or does Tapas take their cut when payout happens?
We would if it was easy to find relevant content. Unfortunately it's not. Recently we tried to find something new to read via search and that did not work well at all. Type in "super heroes" and look at what you get. Type in "manga"... again look at the results. These are huge selling genres in the real world, but on Tapas they seemingly don't exist.
We're not sure why there aren't more genres on Tapas or at least a way for creators to set their series on the back end as a wide variety of genre. Then when readers search "super heroes" they not only get what they want, but then the system sorts it out by popularity/trending so you can find relevant series right away vs. things that are no longer updating or are of marginal quality.
The issue with growth at Tapas is it's too much work to find content beyond what is on the homepage. If people can't find what they want, with relative ease, then they go elsewhere. If our content search experiences as highly loyal Tapas uses is dissatisfying then certainly a potential new reader won't stick around. Consequently you end up with a revolving door where new readers come because of some sort of advertising/marketing effort promoting Tapas, but don't stick around because they can't find what they want to read.
Look at how YouTube does things. Watch a video and the algorithm gives you a list on the right of more videos to watch. It would be great if Tapas did something like that. Instead it only offers are three suggestions at the end that are already in your library, which is self defeating for discovering new series.
It shouldn't be hard to spend all day on Tapas... but it is.
We're not staff so we don't know what happens on the back end, but it seems to reason that Tapas gives the viewer all of the value up front and then takes their cut when the coins are spent (buying premium / tipping). If they are taking a cut both when the ad is watched and then again when the coins are spent, that's double taxation.
A proper tagging system really would fix a lot of the visibility problems for new creators and readers. If you search "superheroes" you get about 16 pages of results, if you search "super heroes" you get over 180 pages, some of which just have "heroes" in the name or author without any reference to the content. There's no consistency so creators have no idea what to tag for, and readers have no idea what to search for. Letting people tag whatever they want isn't super useful if there isn't enough structure for the people doing the searching.
I've had a few people (and family) tell me that they didn't read my comic because they thought Tapas was only per-to-view comics. Just thought I''d mention it~
1 year later
I agree with you, in fact I have difficulty getting myself noticed ... here is my last comic, I have few people ...
1 year later
unpinned May 13, '20
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