Well enough. We only have access to third-party numbers regarding Tapas (courtesy of SimilarWeb) and these numbers we know aren't 100% accurate. That said they're dependable enough to debunk the "decline in users" myth in total.
Our first recorded traffic data is from March 2016, when Tapastic logged an estimated 4,550,000 visits. Fast forward 14 months and in May 2017, Tapas logged an estimated 9,700,000 visits. That's over 100% growth!
Also on July 19, everyone on the app received a push notice "350 Bonus Coins Thank You!"
The notification points out that in the week of July 17th Tapas hit their all time high for daily and monthly readers in the history of Tapastic/Tapas. So that is as good to us as @STAFF answering this thread directly.
On July 30-31st Tapas is also doing a 10M coins tipping event. We don't think they would be setting such a tremendous goal unless they thought it was achievable.
The weekend of September 1st, Tapas is doing not one, not two, but THREE webcomic panels at San Francisco Comic Con. (The schedule is available on SFCC's website.) Programming directors can be amazingly fickle and for them to book Tapas three events shows how much they respect what the platform is doing for the community and the industry.
So from our perspective Tapas is kickin' butt and taking names in Growthville.
@akaluv89 we're not sure when that comic artist joined Tapastic but if they did when it first opened its doors, then yeah, we can see how they had very little growth because the site was just was just starting up back then. And if you are writing text only, then you are going to struggle here for a while because Tapas just added open publishing for novels not that long ago. For example, one of our comics has 3.6k subs but our novel has only 70. It's going to take a while to build up a novel readership on a platform better known for comics.
Still there are some benefits to being early. First off you will have more subs than those who show up later to the party. More subs mean its easier to be found so you will have that advantage over others. Also you can earn ad income and tips vs. on Wattpad where ad income is by invitation only and there is no tipping feature.
We've been here since April 2016 and we can say that you get out of Tapas what you put in. A common misconception is that if you just post content, readers will beat down your door. That's not the case. Only about 5% of creators will get a feature (Spotlight, Daily Snack, Staff Pick) that gives them a quick hit of subs. The other 95% won't. It's up to you then to grow your readership.
Back when we started, getting readers was much easier because there was only half the series there are now. We hit Trending right off the bat which got us around 100 subs off a cover only. After that we found it became much harder to grow. Right away we started doing a lot of promotion such as a Tapastic table at SacAnime Gives Back. It was a tiny convention but we got a nice hit of new subs. Project Wonderful and the $1 Daily Sponsorship at TopWebComics have proven to be worth the investment. We also tried a lot of other things that flopped but hey, it's part of learning the biz.
See, everyone else here is posting content too. In order to "get ahead" you have to post content AND do something else that very few are doing in order to stand out from the crowd. If you do that then the huge built in readership that Tapas has will notice your work and it will take off. But if you just hang up your work and sit with your head down on the proverbial Artists Alley and don't engage then you will get passed by.
The "average" MFA in Creative Writing is $30,000. If you've invested that much into your career then consider spending at least $1,000 promoting yourself and sending all the traffic to your first episode on Tapas. A) You will get subs. B) Tapas will gain more readers so they can sell more premium content and reinvest the proceeds into improving the platform. C) Your fellow creators will appreciate you growing the site for their benefit of more subs for them (no reader reads just one thing).
Win-win-win.