News for the First Weekend of January 2007 (UPDATED)
Submitted by Xaviar Xerexes on January 5, 2007 - 22:33
I won't be online much this weekend so stay safe out there on the digital badlands...
BUSINESS
- Boing Boing points out this small music label that only charges for songs after they get popular. I wonder if this could/should be applied to webcomics?
Most Read Project
- CBGXtra has a press release that The Dreamland Chronicles "surpassed the one-million reader mark" which sounds like it really should state one million cumulative page views (or possibly uniques but hopefully not the worthless "hits") since its debut in January 2006. Stating you have one million readers implies that you have a million folks checking out each update to a serialized strip and it's clear that TDC does not have that kind of readership.
Interviews
- Sequential Tart has an interview with Barb Lien-Cooper, creator of Gun Street Girl.
DEAD TREES
- Boing Boing has a bunch of links about Doonesbury in its write up of the latest Doonesbury book Heckuva Job Bushie!
JUSTIFY MY HYPE
- All kinds of good new stuff starting at Serializer including Some Guy with a Website from political cartoonist and blogger August J. Pollack.
- Lunchbox, a new webcomic from Ovi Nedelcu.
Google analytics can give
by bookofbiff - 01/07/2007 - 02:36
Google analytics can give you a better idea on some of those stats.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
It can give you stats such as uniques over a longer period of time than a month. I like to use it to judge advertising because it will tell me the average pageviews from each referring domain.
But the number of comics that a comic has is definitely the most elusive one to come up with.
http://www.thebookofbiff.com/
http://www.thebookofbiff.com/
I thought the same thing
by Gordon McAlpin - 01/06/2007 - 13:07
I thought the same thing when I saw that Dreamland Chronicles press release at Newsarama. One million unique visitors in year works out to under 3000 readers per day average.
But, hey, whatever. Spin is spin, and if a well-spun, but otherwise relatively unremarkable statistic got a press release that's really about Scott Sava's book run at the mainstream news sites, then more power to him.
But this raises an interesting topic. It's next to impossible to gauge how many readers a webcomic has: I get about the same amount of traffic (around 3000 readers per day average), but how many of that is people who for some reason or another (the forum or OCD, perhaps?) come every day to my weekly webcomic, and how many of those are people who stumble across it once and never come back? I know some people only like to come by once every few weeks and read the strip in chunks. I read most of my favorite webcomics that way, myself. Alexa is next to meaningless, too, except for a vague, ballpark estimate, and for low-traffic websites like even the more popular mid-level webcomics, I expect it's a large ballpark... So how do you know?
Multiplex is a twice weekly humor comic about the staff of the Multiplex 10 Cinemas and the movies that play there.
You Know What You Know
by Xaviar Xerexes - 01/06/2007 - 15:09
As the U.S.'s befuddled former DefSec used to say "You know what you know" (or some other nonsensical phrase)...
Actually it all depends on understanding what you can know from the metrics that have been developed for the Internet and then comparing apples to apples and being straightforward about what you're claiming. We've debated Alexa a lot so no need to rehash that except to say I would never agree that it's "meaningless".
To say you have a million uniques over a year is fine. It's a good number to compare to uniques over a year from other webcomics. It's not equal to a million unique people let alone a million unique readers though as it's a million unique IPs and more than likely he's just adding up numbers from his stats program and if so it's not even a million unique IPs - it's the addition of the number of unique IPs per day over a years time.
For what it's worth and to put it in perspective, Comixpedia seems to do better on Alexa than Dreamland Chronicles. Comixpedia has a respectable but not huge audience by the standards of webcomic audiences these days.
I probably wrote more about this than I otherwise would b/c of the ongoing controversy over Second Life's dubiously vague claim that it has a million residents which the press took to mean a million users when it's fairly clear that residents actually refers to sign-ups (including those where the user never bothered to log-in after signing up). There's a big difference between a million signups and a million users...
____
Xaviar Xerexes
On second thought, let's not go to Comixpedia. It is a silly place.
I run this place! Tip the piano player on the way out.
I did say "next to
by Gordon McAlpin - 01/06/2007 - 15:47
I did say "next to meaningless"... :)
Multiplex is a twice weekly humor comic about the staff of the Multiplex 10 Cinemas and the movies that play there.