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.