Lying about the numbers: Does your comic have “Millions of Fans”?
on July 29th, 2010Let’s talk about hype.
The A Distant Soil comic went online late January 2009. The current traffic is over ten times higher than our traffic in January of last year. We have approximately 9 times more repeat viewers per day.
That is fact, not hype.
Income has increased, largely due to incentives and donations, which I appreciate very much. It’s early days to see a significant increase in sales. I get royalties on the book. Considering I haven’t had a new book out in awhile, that’s a good sign. I realize my expectation of a sales jump on a webcomic anywhere in the first year was unrealistic. The only webcomics I know of which have done well with sales of physical books have been online for three years or more.
There’s an increase in foreign traffic, but it’s doubtful we’re selling a lot of books in Slovenia. That does not diminish my deep appreciation of Slovenia.
I’ve enjoyed learning how to read stat information, especially how to read independent site meters. Many of them are wildly inaccurate, but my linked stat counter sometimes agrees with the info at 7Zoom.com. It’s in the ballpark of a bad day of page views for me.
I’ve compared my traffic to that of other sites, and some people are Liar! liar! Pants on Fire! If their traffic is that low, one wonders where their “millions of fans” are.
They never had ‘em in the first place. Duh.
Anyone can see your book sales, with a little digging. If you run around telling whoppers about how your small press book “sold better than the X-Men”, some gullible blogger may believe you, but the rest of us will wonder where the hell you got those numbers. Especially when we can see that your last graphic novel sold 2,000 copies.
If I had millions of fans one day, and my last book sales dropped to 2,000 copies, I would not be making a public issue of it.
The first time I discussed popularity inflation on the blog, a certain Lying Liar who Lies went to one of those online traffic meters and had their website removed from the system so no one could see that their actual traffic is only a hundred-fifty people a day on one project.
Another who claimed 3,000 unique readers per day showed on their Project Wonderful stats that they got less than 1/4 that traffic. They removed their Project Wonderful ads. One year later, an independent traffic meter indicates the site’s dropping popularity: less than 200 readers per day.
Other sites which show hundreds of thousands of hits per day brag of hundreds of thousands of readers. Hits aren’t unique readers. A single reader can bring dozens of page views per day to your site.
Mr. Hundreds of Thousands of Online Fans really has about 40,000 unique readers. That’s an impressive accomplishment, but it certainly explains why their book sales are less than 3% of their page view count.
Another showed a hit counter with over 30,000,000 hits. I figured their actual total unique readership amounted to no more than 15,000. Independent site analysis came up with an even lower figure.
If your site has been online for years, and you have over 10,000 individual pages (add in chatty message board traffic,) it’s simplicity itself to reach millions of hits, especially if your visible hit counter is set up to show the requests for files from the server, and not actual page views.
I am not naming names here, because I don’t need to rub their noses in it all. If you want to do some digging on your own, feel free. I confess a few friends have had some jolly times passing info back and forth about people who want to seem more popular than they are.
I really must learn to hype me better. Because DAYum, I sell better and get more traffic than the comic with “millions of fans”, and I have a helluva lot more readers than the site which claims 3,000 unique readers per day.
Once upon a time before the internet, lots of publishers and creators lied about their numbers and got away with it. They would add up sales on all editions of all their books and lump that number, and claim huge readerships. And where comics are concerned, we have to wonder just how many of those sales went to shops hoarding books in hopes of selling them at inflated collector prices, and not to individual fans.
Over the course of some 45 books, A Distant Soil has sold upwards of 700,000 copies. Combined. The very highest sales were 40,000 copies for one issue. During my self publishing days, a high average was 20,000, bottoming out somewhere around 7,000.
7,000 copies probably sounds good these days, but at a $1.75 cover price, profits after printing, shipping, etc. were less than $2,000 per issue. Which gave me $1,000 per month income. Ow.
Look at these figures for recently canceled Vertigo books. Fans cry that their faves are gone, but there is Air, not really selling much better than A Distant Soil. How can a major publisher afford to keep paying a penciler/ inker/ writer/ letterer/ colorist on that?
Would my book sell any better with major publisher backing? Hm. I’d have trouble making a living at Air’s sales, and I do all the work on my own book.
The Amazon numbers don’t mean that much. It’s not hard to slip into the Amazon top 100,000 selling only one copy per day. So, you may crow about your ranking, but you can get that ranking on 365 books a year.
Went over my rank on the Diamond sales charts throughout the 1990′s. My book outsold some small press books which claimed “millions of fans” even then. They had to be lying; adding in the sales from trade bookstores would not give them “millions”. It didn’t even give them tens of thousands. It didn’t even give them 5,000.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had millions of fans, but it also had a tv show, movies, and Product Lines of the Gods. If your small press book doesn’t have all that, you don’t have millions of fans.
I understand about the hype machine, and how not letting your project be sprinkled with loser dust makes some people think Hollywood will drop a big check in their lap. But if I can see your website gets low traffic so can Warner Brothers.
While I’m advising my honored readers to question the hype you read online, here’s something to question after San Diego Comic Con when everyone and their cousin Herbert is crowing about a movie deal:
There are a lot of movie deals to be had. You can’t swing a dead cat at a con without hitting a producer. Sometimes I think that’s why we call them “cons”.
I’ve had several movie deals, and one of them helped me buy a nice Donato painting. It’s hanging in my studio. It’s the only time in my whole life I have made what I would consider to be an extravagant purchase.
However, most of these movie deals are hype. There’s no money involved. They don’t mean jack.
The no-money option is a way of getting a blurb in Variety magazine. It’s also a good way of tying up your rights so no one else can use them.
This is dumb.
The whole point of an option is to be paid for the use of your property. If someone is going to take your work off the market – sometimes for years – a serious offer is an offer with some cash to back it up.
Think about the 430 times you’ve heard of this or that movie deal which never seems to go anywhere. While some of these books get stuck in development hell, most of them are just tied up in these loser deals that don’t pay and are only there to tie up the property.
This post isn’t about poking rivals in the eye, because if it were, I’d poke more pointedly. With links.
I hope you will take this as a way to develop a better understanding of the hype machine. Just because someone screams about how popular they are, there are ways to find out the truth for yourself.
Sales are not readers, hits are not readers.
A movie option can be totally bogus.
Lying about your popularity doesn’t make you popular, it just makes you look kind of desperate. Especially when you have yourself deleted from Quantcast.
UPDATE: It’s been some time since I wrote this post, and since I no longer update the blog daily, my traffic has dropped from a high of about 20,000 unique readers a day, to about 1,000. Blogging is more work intensive than I ever dreamed it would be, and I have books to do. Thanks for reading.
PS: I’ve received several complaints the comic is too hard to read online. Someone wrote to tell me to crank up the resolution. Sorry, that would kill my server. I’d love to post larger images, but that would mean redesigning the site as well as re-sizing and re-uploading all 400 previous pages. I just can’t do that right now.
Instead of moaning, they could just, y’know, go out and buy the book! It’s all there, thrice as large and thrice as lovely.
I am not inspired to drop a load of cash on a site redo, that’s for sure. It would take the entirety of my last royalty check. I’d rather save that to finance the three months I have blocked out to work on new pages.
@Allan: I was just going to say the same thing! Don’t like how it looks online? BUY A COPY FOR YOURSELF, cheapskate! Duh.
I still laugh at the guy (part time movie extra who wanted to break into the indy film biz) who seriously thought that because we were friends, I would be thrilled about his offer to buy the movie rights to Pont-au-Change for ONE DOLLAR. Whoopie. And of course how I should have been honored to even be considered for his once in a lifetime deal.
That it should only be once in a lifetime, such a deal.
I’ve had five movie option offers this year.
So.
What.
Contact my agent, be willing to write a check.
Please stop wasting my time. I’m not desperate.
Really.
Somehow I’m reminded of the exchange in Daria:
Jane’s brother Trent, talking about his band, Mystik Sprial:
“We’ll never sell out.”
Jane:
“Because in order for that to happen, you have to have a buyer.”
Yay! I’m one of the 4400!
Or should that be “I’m one of 4400?”
Okay… gonna donate your daily ad revenue. Just because of the cool stuff you talk about, like walking onions.
Geez… even Marvel.com and DCcomics.com don’t have “millions of viewers” a day! Who’s the leader? Could be XKCD. Geez… he encodes a secret message into one of his comics, and six months later, a thousand people show up at a park in Boston!
http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/48208-wisdom-of-crowds/
(And note to students: read his color survey!)
And yeah… if the image is too small, read the books. A lot of libraries have them, for free! Just ask!
I did me a favor and followed up in a new post.
BTW, I know you’re being facetious, but we’re not going to play guess the website here. For the record, I didn’t even look at any of the sites you mention; I studied stuff I thought would have a similar readership to mine.
I also targeted print comic successes, and compared their online traffic with their sales data. That’s why I mentioned the Diamond sales figures, and books like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I also looked at projects like The Phoenix Requiem, which I think is a boffo web comic and gets very fine traffic, and doesn’t fib about it.
My hosting service gives me visitor stats. My problem is that although it shows high numbers of hits, when I look at specific pages, I can pretty much guess that most of the initial hits that pump the numbers so high are just spambots and search engine spiders. I haven’t figured out how to dump those numbers to get a truer picture of the actual humans visiting.
But I do think that many who tout high numbers are NOT discounting the bots and spiders.
(I have a fairly low readership at present. But then I don’t have daily content being added, but rather a lot of permanent, static pages.)
About a year ago, some poor webcomicker dude posted how he could not make any money on his website even though he got 20,000 hits a day.
There were many links to the post, and everyone made sad noises about the plight of the webcomicker.
Someone looked up the dude’s stats independently, and even though he’d been posting for something like two years, the dude’s real traffic was about 200 hits a day.
I tried to find the post, but can’t, but as near as I can recall, he did not get accurate info from his site meter and was completely misled by his hit count.
My original hit counter form years ago did the same thing, but the new one discards bots, robots and spiders.
I can see every IP and what every reader does from that IP, how many times they return, etc.
I am not interested in seeming outrageously popular, I am interested in what the situation actually is. Which is midlist.
And while I think some people don’t know how to read their data, I know others just make this stuff up.
One artist I know of and do not like very much (disclosure alert) promoted themselves to a publisher claiming they got 15,000 unique readers a day. This publisher was not very web savvy, and bought this hook, line, and sinker. I kept mum, because I didn’t want to get into the mess.
They published the artist’s book, and were mystified when it got orders of only 3000 copies, and that’s pretty slim when you account for this publisher’s distribution.
Now I knew this artist was lying big time, because I could see their Alexa ranking was below the 2,000,000 mark. There is NO WAY you are getting 15,000 unique readers a fricking day when you have a rank that low.
It is now several years later, I just looked up their site, and it had no Alexa ranking at all. Which means it gets no measurable traffic.
By contrast, I presented my numbers to my publisher at 15,000 unique readers a month. Which is on the low end, because even though the core readership of the ADS site tops out at about 12,000, there is drive by traffic, and we can advertise to drive by traffic.
My book sold 10,000 copies, which is healthy and exactly within the target range based on my core readership.
So the one person lied and hosed the publisher, and did not get repeat business.
I told the truth, made a solid sale, and got a second sale after based on actual performance.
I hate to brag, but I have… oh, dozens and dozens of readers. Some of whom are not my mother.
@JKCarrier yep, here’s to dozens
which can mean more than twelve, right?
It’s funny, I know from past conversations one of the sites Colleen’s talking about and I compared my poor little semi functioning still on hiatus website to their stats… and mine was higher. What an eye opener that was.
But how can that be? They have “millions of fans”!
Sure.
Site quantifiers can be off, but not THAT far off.
I think a good site to compare and analyze is the http://www.annerice.com website.
Though her Alexa ranking is lower than http://www.ADistantSoil.com's, and her page views per day are fairly low (less than 2,000), stat counters show a fairly high unique reader hit count average of 20,000 per month, spiking to as many as 80,000.
She’s a best selling author who hasn’t had a big hit in awhile. She doesn’t update frequently, so it makes sense that people don’t pop in regularly.
What I get are 10,000+ people who pop in and come back repeatedly, so my page hits are higher, even though I have a smaller global market.
The site Arlnee and I compared (and aren’t going to make public) has neither claim to their fame.
Despite bragging of worldwide popularity, they have extremely low page hits per day (about 150,) and no more than a couple hundred unique readers a month, despite regular posts. Their unique reader stats max at about 1,000 (they got a shill link from a major site,) and then bottom out so low the stat reader can’t measure them.
Their Alexa ranking is over 6,000,000.
There is absolutely no way that creator is as popular as they claim to be.
Alexa ranking measures page views, but advertisers want to reach a wide array of customers. So even though I get more traffic than Anne Rice, her site reaches more individuals worldwide, and so it’s valued higher than mine.
I intend to change that. We’ll see where we are in a year.
This was certainly an informative read, thank you. :3
Though to be fair, I’m sure some really don’t know for sure. Recently, I did some ad campaigning for my own webcomic, and according to project wonderful, got around a few thousand hits at its height (only a smidgen of said number actually stuck around, of course, that was purely people who clicked the link once) yet when I looked it up at that site, it didn’t even reach 800. With exaggeration on such a small scale as my site, I can only imagine it getting MORE extreme for sites with more hits.
(By the way, where on 7zoom does it show unique monthly users? I’m curious about that, and will be all the more so on a month I don’t advertise.)
I also find the idea of people complaining about the image quality silly. Your pages are beautiful, the detailwork is breathtaking. And if its something you care that much about, it doesn’t seem to difficult to find copies of your works. The size right now is plenty, and I assure you, if you had it larger, you would get more complaints from people with slower computers who wouldn’t want to wait half an hour for the page to load.
I’m certain many don’t know for sure, and I mention this in a comment a few posts up. I know for a fact a few others do know better.
The PW ads also require some critical thinking. The graphic shows views for the add, and the BOTTOM graph shows unique viewers.
The bottom number is closer to your unique traffic.
I know that much, and it WAS the bottom graph I was looking at, so it took me by surprise how different it was.
(On the other, hand, it was sort of comforting; 800 becoming 200 is much nicer then 4-5 thousand becoming 200; it means more people are staying around. I like that thought much better then thousands fleeing from my comic. ;P)
As far as knowing better, I’ll take your word on it, I didn’t mean to offend or anything, I’m sorry. ^^;
I do need to add that your comic reads fine on the web.
There is no need to crank up the resolution.
What are they trying to go – grab the images and print their own comic?
@ Aurora: usually my unique reader info is pretty close to the mark, but I’ve had a few situations where it seems there were hours long delays in the counter traffic reading, as if the traffic from 8PM – 12 AM didn’t get counted until the following day. So the previous day’s traffic was too low, and the next day’s was too high.
@ Miki:
The first few dozen pages or so are at 72 dpi. I had another service provider, and he complained about my load on his server, demanding I remove the comic and reload at 72 dpi.
DC McQueen fixed the load problem, and after 2-22-09, they are at higher res. (DC also moved me to another service.)
I didn’t got around to re-loading the old ones. Frankly, I forgot about it, and I don’t really have time now.
Try loading the first few pages, and then go forward a couple months. The load times on the 72 dpi are pretty fast and there is a big difference in image quality.
OK, I went back and loaded a couple of pages at higher res, and it is going to take awhile, since simply deleting posts will remove all comments and links.
It took 30 minutes to resize and load 2 pages, so I will have to do this when I can. I have about 40 pages to go.
I wouldn’t bother, Colleen. Really, they’re just fine as they are.
I agree with Allan, the images are fine. If someone really wants to admire artwork closely, they can buy it.
And about that prolonged reset time… that makes a lot of sense, actually. I’m up at odd hours, so it fits when campaigns are run pretty well. Makes sense.
For your amusement, one of the sites I mentioned which claims millions of readers and quietly removed itself from Quantcast analysis, reads this site with religious fervor. And has quietly returned to Quantcast.
It’s monthly traffic is too low to estimate.
That seems funny – that a Big Numbers claimer reads your site with “religious fervor.” Of course, I too read it with (almost) religious fervor, and my monthly traffic is very low on my site — but then I don’t claim millions of readers.