One dumb question.
How many pageviews (or readers) is needed to be a succesfull webcomic 10,000, 30,000 , 50,000, 90,000? at least for making a living, what is the magic number?
thanks in advance.
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Ads won't be enough
I think you have to think about how you can make money and how devoted those fans are. Ads will only get you a little ways - books, merchandise, and other strategies seem to be how people are making a "success" of their webcomic (success here strictly in a financial sense) and that depends a lot on whether your fans will buy them.
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Xaviar Xerexes
On second thought, let's not go to Comixpedia. It is a silly place.
Figure out how much money
Figure out how much money you make from each ad displayed. This depends on the number and type of ads you have, and may be on a sliding scale -- you might get nothing for 1-1000 impressions, then one-hundredth of a penny for the next 1000, etc. This is Ad revenue per page, or A.
Figure out the cost of your hosting or bandwidth per page. This depends on the size of your pages and images and your host. This is Bandwidth cost, or B.
You make money when A-B>0.
It's more complicated than that because both variables often have sliding scales, and often hosting is paid for in fixed monthly costs instead of per-bandwidth amounts. (In which case Ax - b > 0 is a better formula, with x the number of page hits in a month and b the monthly hosting cost.)
To give you an idea, Randy Mulholland of Something Positive once said that his 'break-even' point was 5,000 page views per day. Your answer may be larger or smaller than that, depending on the ads you use and the size of your pages and images. But it's not hard to calculate...just add up the money coming in and deduct the money going out.
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I don't think there really
I don't think there really is a "magic number." You can have tons of readers, but they could be a group unwilling or unable to spend money to support your comic so that you can make a living off your work.
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