This is a cool idea! You can have curators for each genre and have them specialize in only that... the snack could also feature one comic per genre per day so every genre gets an even visibility
I 100% agree with the spirit of what you're saying. But here are some things to note:
- High sub count =/= more exposure on the site/app.
I know, because my comic has a high-ish sub count (10k) but it's still buried. If a significant portion of your subscribers aren't keeping up with the comic, that will kill your chance at making it to popular/trending.
Some people might think it's still better to have 4000 subs, of which 400 people are actually reading... than to have 100 subs, all of whom are active. Well, the 100% active 100-sub comic has a better chance at finding new people who will, hopefully, actually read the comic. Much better chance than the 10% active 4000 sub comic.
Also,
- The current daily snack is already curated by hand, I think?
...Not sure but that's what I always thought? I also think the staff is already open to suggestions, even though they don't have an official "submit your suggestion here" thing. I've heard of people sending suggestions via Twitter and such.
Finally, not really a counterpoint, just something that I feel bears repeating:
This, so much. No offense to the hardworking creators -- it's just as a reader, I want to see more VARIETY. And I don't even have the app! I imagine it must be even more redundant for people who use both the app and the desktop version.
See, on the one hand, creators should not rely on Tapas to do all the promotion for them. But if the redundancy is bad enough to bother readers, that doesn't help anyone.
Maybe instead of looking at it as "how to help struggling creators," we should look at it as "how to help readers find new content they might like, regardless of how popular or not popular it may be." The solution may turn out to be the same for both, but the latter approach is more sensible and less divisive IMO.
I have thought this same thing. I've only been on Tapastic a few months, but where I'm getting 1500-2000 people visiting a month over on smackjeeves, I'm getting barely any over here on Tapastic, and I think it's mostly due to the way Tapastic has their front page set up to cater to popular established comics, and has nothing to help new users get seen. I'd like to see a section on the front page with newly updated comics and/or curator picks. I actually really like the way the smackjeeves site has everything set up for their users including customizable coding for their pages, the only reason I posted over here on Tapastic was for the tipping and revenue features, which smackjeeves is lacking.
I fully support something like this for Tapastic though.
Click to see Chaotic Nation17 the original comic series, now on Tapastic.
oh yes! This is so true! I am always searching for good, long story-comics, but it is so difficult to find those with only one-panel comics making it in the top.
Keii4ii said it all i think. if i'm not mistaken the daily snack is already curated and they even are working on giving some space for non gag comics.
tbh the best option would be making a section on the main page (website and app) with something like "this week recomendations" or something like that and really make an extra effort to look into all the giant stream of comics and check them, getting some of the nice and promising ones and doing a 1 paragraph "why you should check it out".
I thought the staff already go through every single comic out there to curate which one goes to daily snack?
or am I wrong?
@silencelibrarian Nope. They used to, but that was a long time ago. These days they have too much work + too many comics on the site to keep up with every single comic update across the site.
It's my understanding the the Daily Snack is picked from comics based on how they are "trending+popularity on days when it updates"
They don't go through everything. there's a lot of comics. I think we need a broader group.
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.
