Stuart Robertson weighs in with an interesting list of comic websites ranked by their PageRank status with Google.
PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It’s the numeric value assigned to represent how important each page is on the web. When one page links to another, it is effectively casting a vote for that page. Links from pages with a higher PageRank are given more weight in calculating the overall PageRank.
Ghastlycomic.com is 5/10 while chick.com is 6/10. Damnit! Jack Chick is appearently more important than I am. I’m clearly not doing enough to spread the message of tentacled love.
I assume too that 10/10 is most important and 1/10 is least important.
If that’s the case where are the 10/10 and 9/10 sites in the webcomic catagory. Or the 2/10 and 1/10 sites for that matter. This list only has 3/10 to 8/10. I would have thought that Penny Arcade would be the 10/10 for webcomics.
I’m still burning with bitter rage and disappointment that I’ve been beaten by Jack Chick.
Someday… someday…
It’s cute how this guy thinks Google’s PageRank means anything. =3
page rank means everything, google knows this and so they gave themselves 10/10
now all the real cool people rank with pigeons
It’s adorable! XD
Google.com and Yahoo.com score 10/10. MicroSoft.com scores 9/10. The highest ranked comic websites I could find got 8/10. If anyone knows of a big site that’s not on the list, let me know. I didn’t include any comic websites that scored less than 3/10 because I wanted to focus on sites that were doing well in the ranking — which I felt was 3/10 and higher.
This list doesn’t rank sites in terms of artwork, writing, humour, frequency of updates, quality of web design, or even number of hits. It’s just one way of looking at the relative success of the marketing efforts of these comic websites in relation to one another. What makes the list interesting (to me, anyway) is that it includes all types of comic websites: web, print, indie, publisher, news, discussion, blog.
I guess when you think about it, all it is doing is simply counting the number of times it finds a link to the website on other searchable websites and ranking accordingly. So Jack Chick gets a bonus because he’s linked to not only by the people who love him and his message but also the people who love him in an ironic sort of way or even hate him. I, on the other hand, am really only linked to by people who like my work so I’m already at a disadvantage compaired to Chick.
Given the fact too that there is a certain social stigma attached to linking to people such as Clay, Josh, and myself due to the graphic content of our work that’s a further advantage in favour of Chick.
Awwww who am I kidding. The guy is a freaking billioneir! Seriously, how can I compete against him? He has the most brilliant merchandising scheme of any comic artist anywhere in the world. Seriously!
How many single comics can you or I ever hope to sell to an individual? One copy of a book? Maybe two in the case of an extreme collector who likes to buy one to bag and one to read. That’s about it. Chick’s readers have to not only buy dozens of copies of a single comic from him but they have to give them all away less they face the infinite wrath of a cruel and vengeful god who will cast them for all eternity into a lake of fire. How the hell can any of us compete against that?
Man… I need to turn my comic into a religion somehow. Then I’ll start making money.
“Have you heard the good news about Tentacles, sister?”
Woohoo! Taxfree status!
Hot on the heel’s of yesterday’s list, it’s the…
Comic Traffic Ranking 2005
Alexa rates a site for the traffic which has visited over a period of months, and we’ll be looking at the average for the last 3 months for websites from our Comic Website Ranking 2005. Some slightly different results from our last “Best of” list.
Stuart –
Nicely formatted list – very interesting to skim through it in that format.
Just in case you’re new to Comixpedia we did make some efforts to measure a more limited set of sites – single webcomic sites – back in 2003. Click on the Most Read topic icon to this story to see a full list of articles in this category. Alexa data is interesting to me and I’ve tried to make use of it before.
It is pulled from people who actually download and install the Alexa toolbar, however, so many folks discussing it here felt that it was by definition significantly flawed.
That’s why I went with PageRank first — although that’s got it’s flaws as well. 🙂
I think looking at a variety of ranking/measuring tools, and seeing common trends is useful though. I mean, it’s pretty clear that Bob the Angry Flower if a MUCH more popular site than I thought!
You know, I don’t think that there will ever be any sort of way to accurately rank each other except perhaps for all webcomic artists to install the exact same stats tracker and then compair the pageviews from one to another. Even that will probably have it’s share of woes and inadiquacies. Of course a lot of people don’t want to give out that kind of information.
Personally I don’t worry about it. I know I’ve got “lots” of readers and I know the readers I’ve got like my comic. That’s all that really matters. I’m serving a niche market and I think I’m doing it rather well. I know how I rank compaired to my peers on Keenspace in terms of pageviews. I’m first in terms of pageviews on Keenspace, making up at the moment 8.387% of all Space pageviews. Webalizer tells me that for December my total number of pageviews was 2,164,524 (not bad I think for a guy who only publishes once a week). That would mean that as a whole Keenspace gets approximately what, 26 million pageviews each month (I suck ass at math). How does Keenspace and how do I rank against other sites and comics? Beats me. Unless they have webalizer and shared their pageviews I wouldn’t know.
Google’s ranking seems much more accurate I would suppose than Alexia’s.
Of course all this is, at best is just a popularity contest which doesn’t really mean anything in terms of artistic merit. Crap can be insanely popular at times (Reality TV anyone?). There are a huge number of webcomic artist with increadable artistic merit, guys who as artists completely blow someone like me away and even people like Fred Gallagher and Gabe and Tycho.
Concentrating efforts on trying to rank those of us who are popular is at best a waste of time and at worst a diservice to webcomic readers. That time could be better spent trying to find those hidden jems out there in the vast dirtpile of webcomics. Who cares if Penny Arcade is 5000 times more popular than Ghastly’s Ghastly Comic. Chances are people who are into webcomics have at least heard of either one of us wether they read us or not and have their own opinions about our merits.
I would really love to see more effort spent in bringing obscure artists of deserving talent to light than to have the webcomic scene turned into some dick measuring (or tentacle measuring as the case may be) contest. All I can see coming from this is a lot of bad vibes.
Some of my favourite artists/comics scored 3/10 (or lower) on the Google PageRank… and there are comics at 7/10+ that I’ve never even heard of. Agaom… don’t mistake high traffic/linkage for artistic merit.
I still think they’re interesting stats. 😀
Oh there is interest in the stats, that is to be sure, but I always worry that people will think these stats actually mean something when they are merely a curiosity at best.
I do wonder why you’ve included sites such as Homestar Runner which is a toon, not a comic and FARK which is a newsportal. The only thing I can see with FARK relating to comics is that my Total Fark account causes me to waste so much productivity that it can be a real struggle to get any work at all done on my comic if I’m anywhere within eyesight of a computer with internet access.
I’m sure that’s a problem shared by other webcomic artists as well.
Your math is close enough – I figure Keenspace got 27 million and change for that month.
I’ve included a few sites that aren’t strictly comic sites, but have a passing association, and should help to gauge the sites overall rankings on the web.
Also, this isn’t just a webcomic list… it’s more general than that.