Scans_Daily: Actual, you know, data
One of the arguments that’s been trotted out in the wake of the scans_daily closing– sorry, scans_daily is how I see it should be written — is that having things posted there tipped people off to cool things to read. We have anecdotes of people spending $2800 because of books that they saw on s_d, pitted against sales figures for monthly comics that have been going down month after month, year after year. Most of this is difficult, because there are very few correlations that can be pointed to that make us say, "Ah! Someone posted five pages of Stupendous Man #73 and sales went up!"
However, we actually do have data that we can point to– webcomics.
At various times, people used scans_daily to promote their webcomics, books that couldn’t be gotten any other way. And at one point, so did ComicMix. I posted the first seven pages of The Original Johnson to scans_daily on January 19th, Martin Luther King Day, to see what sort of traffic we could get.
How much traffic did we get? A negligible bump. Fifty click throughs at most over a few days, and not many of them stuck around.
As a point of comparison, the New York Times ran an article on The Original Johnson a month prior on Christmas Day, 2008, the least visited day of the year for the website and the newspaper. The article was buried in the sports section. And we got well over twenty-five times the click throughs from the Times alone, and seventy times the traffic.
So– was scans_daily a good promotional platform? I’d have to say no. Why? Because it was an illicit group, and had to stay under the radar. As an illicit group, it was limited as to how much it could grow– it had less than nine thousand readers when it went down. As Warren Ellis pointed out, it couldn’t be used to promote anything. What it could do– and did very well– was reproduce a lot of comics storylines well enough, month after month, so that people didn’t need to actually buy the comics over time.
There have been a lot of successes from online promotion. And we’ll see what sort of traffic we get from a link on Ain’t It Cool News, which wrote Lone Justice up today. But scans_daily has not been seen to have a positive impact on readership from our point of view. We’ll update you in a few days when the traffic dies down. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to publish any other actual data — Kevin Church, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Woo woo woo.
In the meantime, a few more links:
- Copyright Holders Challenge Sites That Scrape Content – NYTimes.com Convenient timing.
- Robot 6 » A little more on the shutdown of Scans Daily
- Mightygodking.com » And I Shall Call It Dumbassopalooza: scans_daily and Peter David and The Internet is like a stone rolling downhill sometimes.
- Colleen Doran » Archive » Scans Daily
- airings: S_D’s demise from a person who really was there at the start of it.
No offence but maybe your web comics just didn't appeal to that demographic of readers?
Haven't read any of the links (though they're open in BG tabs waiting), but i have to say that the NYTimes has for some time been on a rampage about bloggers quoting their articles, to the extent that i seem to recall that they were demanding payments if you used something like six words, even if it was like "A recent article in the NYTimes says '
I think that was AP, not the Times.
You might be right, come to think. It was the NYTimes that maintained a pissy "You must register to access any content on this site, even if someone else linked to it and you didn't know that."
So– was scans_daily a good promotional platform? I'd have to say no. Why? Because it was an illicit group, and had to stay under the radar.I'd say no as well, but for a different reason – the culture of the group was relatively resistant to active promotion (IE "here is my comic you should all read it"). If somebody else had posted "hey here is this awesome comic about a boxer and it is called The Original Johnson and here are two pages I liked," maybe your hit rate would have increased. I found that, when I was getting hits from s_d for the various comic remixes I did while on Livejournal (and later on my blog), that somebody else posting a link to a remix would always get more response than me doing it.
Glad to hear we have more data points. How much more traffic are we talking about here? A multiple of two? Ten?In short, is there anything to the argument that "hey, it's all good promotion"?
Do you guys spend any time actively campaigning for article placements, especially for something with such a built-in audience like Johnson? A query letter to Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel is not a ridiculous idea. Even a note to Boxing magazine of the folks at ESPN would be worth a few minutes' time.Marketing is such an important part of any product's success, and yet so few comics people try them. I'm seriously considering starting a blog called "Crazy ideas that just might work", where I come up with random (and cheap) ideas for comics publishers and stores to get the word out to the mainstream about their products. Freee Comic Book day is fast approaching, and I've been beating my head against the wall for years now trying to get stores to take a few minutes to get some publicity BEFORE the goddam day, instead of all the newspaper articles and even tv news pieces about it when it's OVER.
In the Uk we don't really have the "free comic book day" as you do in the US but do have the wolrld book day thats getting bigger and bigger !! as the school my nine year old gos to has turn it into world book week with dressing up and bed time storys with warm milk at the school with the kids taking in there most loved book and showing others and telling them why they like it so much its got so big its got its own website http://www.worldbookday.com to inform kids on any signings or events in there area !!
A) Unit sales have actually been increasing, not decreasing, so you fall at the first hurdle there.B) As said above, maybe people just didn't like your comic. I was a regular poster there and I never heard of it, so, apparently it may not have the widespread appeal you think it did. C) Also as stated above, you're confusing Scans_Daily with a promotional tool. As Warren Ellis has stated, it wasn't somewhere that could be /used/. Someone posting their own work was often looked on with less enthusiasm than someone posting something and saying "I think this is really cool."Personally I don't believe that the site had the HUGE impact some are attributing it with. I think it was a site unique on the net which had SOME impact. A significant one? Not on big titles, but on a few minor titles which were well loved? Maybe a little. Blue Beetle, I'm looking at you.
I agree that scans_daily wasn't really effective as a promotional tool. However, I also think it's not a good idea to compare them to The New York Times in terms of effectiveness. Of course NYT would get you more hits – they cover a larger community. I wouldn't be surprised to find more people read their paper and visit their web site than the readership of the comic news blogosphere combined.
I agree with mightygodking that self-promotion tends not to work as well as recommendations from an uninvolved party. I think it was hard for a lot of people to get past the "look at me!" implication of linking to one's own comic.Personally, I really enjoy myself a good webcomic, but I don't think of them the same way I think of mainstream comics. I expect punctuality, high talent and consistency from a monthly book. The work schedules are structured. It's hard for creator-controlled webcomics to guarantee any of that – quite often, writers/artists lose interest or life gets in the way, and their comics don't update for month and months, if ever again (No Pink Ponies?). Or the writer and artists get in a tiff, and one replaces the other with somebody inferior. Seeing these same patterns play out time and again in webcomics I've read has made me extremely hesitant to try new ones. (Plus, slogging through multiple years backlog doesn't sound like fun to me, but I'm one of those people who prefers series to have endings in sight, so that might just be an individual peeve)Aside from that, there's always the chance that people weren't interested in the subject matter of the comic in question, of course.But that doesn't mean that you don't have a good point: a limited community doesn't translate to widespread exposure. While the amount of articles being written about scans_daily show that it was known by more than just its official members, I don't think that all of the people discussing it have necessarily visited on a regular enough basis to have contributed to any increased interest/exposure for some of the post subjects, namely webcomics.