It's true that producing a story-based comic usually takes up more time for the creator than a slice-of-life strip. I draw a story-based comic in full colour that updates twice a week. I can easily spend 10+ hours on a single page. It's very labour intensive, and I wouldn't do it if I didn't love my comic so much.
HOWEVER - a lot of these slice of life comics that you mention?
They can, and often do, take almost as much time to make.
Not all of them require the same amount of work in the actual drawing-process - especially since a lot of the really popular ones here on Tapastic have these beautifully simple art styles that I envy so much when I'm stuck drawing a million panels of bamboo forests - but I can promise you that a lot of time and effort goes into the planning and writing of them.
If a decade+ of drawing comics has taught me anything, it's that comedy is really hard to do well - and not all slice-of-life comics here on Tapastic are comedy. A lot of them are autobiographical, or even dramatic, or just telling a longer story about their characters, just in a vertical strip format.
Also -
did you know that drawing a simplistic style really, really well means you have to put in as much effort and skill as you have to when drawing a more realistic figure? I actually find it a LOT harder to be cartoony in a really good way than I do drawing realistic figures.
.
And if we're to leave the artwork aside entirely, and speak only of what you refer to as zero-effort comics.
Yes, there may or may not be super-popular comics on Tapastic that are genuinely zero-effort and terrible.
I just haven't found them.
I know that something like, say, Sarah's Scribbles might look as though there's very little effort put into them, but there is. I'm not subscribed to it, but only because it's always on the front page anyway so I don't have to go looking for it - I genuinely find most of the strips funny, and the artstyle serves to make the jokes even more funny.
Sometimes, a comic doesn't need dramatic angles or super-detailed artwork to be good. These blank-background 4 panel jokes are popular because they manage to be funny without being intensely detailed, and that's okay! For the same reason that not every movie has to be Oscar-worthy to be entertaining, not every comic has to be a full-colour story-comic with realistic artwork to be interesting or worth reading!
.
As for why 4-panel slice of life comics are more popular in general than story-comics, it's for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones is that they're easier to get into. If someone links you to it, you can read an episode, laugh a bit, and enjoy it even if you've read NONE of the previous pages. A story-comic requires you to read a whole bunch of pages before you can know if you like it or not - and people are busy. Not everyone can invest that kind of time.
If a creator of a story-comic wants their work to the popular, they have to put in a LOT of effort in promoting themselves and putting their comic where people can see it, and that takes time and energy, but it needs to be done. There is no magic secret that slice of life-creators know that you don't - they're just doing comics that happen to be easier to pick up, and that's okay.
