This is a concern I have also felt. The small creators are struggling to be noticed, as is evident in their attempts to be seen in the forums by creating new posts announcing their comics release, and their concern over small growth over long periods of time.

As for the issue with the daily snack, I look at the these not for comics I already follow and know of, but to find new content. I have seen many comics repeatedly featured there, most of which are from the more popular creators. I can find their content all over the front page of Tapas, why do I need to see them in the daily snack as well?

If possible, please pin this post. It is highly relevant and curators are something that Tapas should seriously consider. If the daily snacks were based on suggestions from curators, I believe that readers and creators alike would benefit greatly from this feature.

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.

@keii4ii @SaberCow
so... basically a robot curate the daily snack
that is dissapointing
if they wanna automate the system, they better write a better algorithm

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://tapas.io/series/Earths-Immigrant4

I like the ideas as I spoke with you in Skype Dave,

As we although think, Tapastic is well let's recognize it where the gag-comic will be extremely popular

Now I know they have OTHER genre of comic who reach the popular sections. don't get me wrong I am aware of it.

so aside this why instead of curator...we have a better popular/trending section?
I am speaking about other website where I publish my comic...
and they are divised by genre.
Like the Top gag-comic the Top horror, the top romance etc

I think this would diversify the front page A LOT in my opinion...so instead having a front page full of example action comic...they would have diversity!
it's wouldn't completely fix the exposure issue...but would help to have diversity!

the daily snack could work the same no? like having one comic of each category.

This would make the diversity WAY better and maybe help to find some other comic?

what do you think about this?

I have to agree very strongly with the comic ceiling point. The way Tapas is built has led to a certain handful of comics that are super popular and remain popular simply for being popular . . . so they end up being the only ones seen at all times, which just continues to fuel them with minimal effort. Additionally, because of the growing traffic of the website, and the increasing number of readers, it takes a lot more now to break into Popular/Trending. When you add in the fact that getting into those sections requires you to compete with those popular comics mentioned, it's become unnecessarily difficult.

Three years ago, it would take maybe 500 views to get into Trending/Popular; now it takes a few thousand, views that most people just don't get because there are comics that automatically get those views from constantly being in Popular, Trending, Daily Snack, and just featured all the time via banners and other things here and there (plus the genre matters too - I hate to bring it back to this argument, but yes, gag-a-day and BL are basically the prerequisite genre to making it anywhere on Tapas, especially if you want to break through that comic ceiling that's been formed as a direct result of these genres).

Tapas is gonna grow, and that's just an inevitability. It's not a bad thing. But the way the site is built basically means that the more it grows, the less variability you see in content - because all that traffic is being redirected to the same small handful of comics over and over again, from every possible angle.

This is something I'm constantly thinking about and how to change that to my advantage.
Starting this year I heavily promoted my comic on facebook and twitter and got some increased view amounts and subscribers. But I also realized that the format of my comic isn't competable against the most popular stuff here on tapas. In fact, I see myself unable to ever get successful on tapas because of the way it works: get a lot of comments and likes in a short period of time. That's not how my comic works. It's a slow and steady journey. Often I don't get comments at all because... yeah, why should I. It's a new page. Great!

I know my readership is very faithful but also quiet. By cleverly promoting the comic on Facebook I reached Trending a few times and I got a handful of new subscribers... which are also of the silent type or they just read the comic once a month when 10 pages are up. I know people like my comic and it doesn't suck. But it's just not detectable on tapas. I'm constantly thinking about how readers can find me if I'm not promoting (which takes A LOT OF TIME, gosh) and I'm clueless here on tapas:

• The search feature is... strange. How are the comics ranked?
• I have to decide solely on ICON AND TITLE when I'm looking for a new comic
• I have to click/tap more than 3 times to get from popular section to a genre I like

That's not really readerfriendly. And honestly I don't enjoy looking for new comics on tapas. I find the best comics on Twitter because creators provide more important information in a tweet: a bigger image and a catchy description.

I don't think it's an issue of visibility. Some comics just do better on one platform than another.
I personally had the exact opposite experience of everyone here. On all sites I tried previous to tapas I got little to no attention. I struggled hard and worked my ass off. Then when I came to tapas, my hard work finally began giving results. Someone here said "You don't get attention or new subs by being on page 5 of trending!!" but that's where I started out. And that's where I was for a long time. I had to work my ass off to get out of there, but that's how the art business works. If you're in it for popularity, you're in the wrong business. You'd probably do better as a youtube makeup guru or a blogger or pretty much aaaanything else if you just want quick and easy eyes on you.

I want it to be easier for small artists that are ready to put in the work on a regular basis to get the attention they deserve, but now that the popular section is pushed faaaaaar down on the page whereas trending is fairly high up, I don't think tapas has done that bad of a job to approach this. There's even a weird thing that takes you to a completely random comic when you sign in on desktop. The only thing they could do to help small comics besides this, in my opinion, is create a snack feed for small comics only and create a section for "just added an episode" on the front page. That would be an improvement, sure, but that doesn't mean tapas is doing BADLY right now.

Keep in mind that no algorithm will help if you don't work your ass off to study it and use it to your advantage.
Momentum and hard work is everything.

I work like 10-14 hours a day... Tell me again about "minimal effort" ._.

I was going to suggest that a lot of comics would benefit from the comic collections being updated and expanded upon... but I've just noticed that they're no longer on the main Tapas site(?)

Tapas have specific types/formats of comics that they like to promote, which I have no qualms about; you have to remember that they're also trying to bring in new users and build a brand image. But, I always secretly hoped for a magical girl collection! Ehe

I would like a clearly visible and more easily accessible just-updated section that shows comics that just uploaded an episode. I have a feeling this is what helps new comics rise on webtoons and smackjeeves.

I think they have collections that change regularily on the app?
Magical girls don't get much attention on here and would be a fun change actually xD

Absolutely. The "fresh" section is a tiny, easily-ignored square at the bottom of the page. I don't really understand why.