Then again, if I had a revelatory moment interrupted by someone who treated the whole experience as trivial . . . AND I hadn’t slept or had a shower yet . . . I wouldn’t be polite either.

http://www.bearskinrug.co.uk/_articles/2010/01/19/dancing_monkey/

It takes YEARS to gather an online audience. GG is five years on the web. And it premiered first in print, so it had LOTS of inventory to post and a built in audience.

Many people are going straight to the web with original material, not realizing just how freaking long it takes to build that audience. After not being able to bring in any decent dough (or reader numbers) after a year or three, the love is gone. Creators try to produce enough per week to maintain reader interest. If you are not able to bring at least three pages a week to your site, your readers will get bored and go somewhere else.

Some webcomics sites I assumed must be terribly popular are getting nice traffic, but not making many bucks. And some which claim to be wildly popular may be getting the page hits, but there are page hits and Absolute Unique Readers, and that number is almost always MUCH lower. I recall one site which claimed to have 250,000 unique readers. I went to multiple stat tracking sources, and found out they actually have about 50,000. More important than even the unique readers are the number of REGULAR readers.

For example, my stat counter tells me that I have had as many as 50,000 unique readers per month. But when I drill down the info, that comes to about 15,000 REGULAR readers. That is my actual audience. This is significantly higher then one year ago, but not enough YET for me to be fully self-supporting on the web.

And frankly, some people fib about their numbers. A blog site which some had told me was popular, and which claims right there on its page to have 3500 unique readers PER DAY, has nothing of the kind. It doesn’t even have 3500 page views per day. There’s only so much numbers conflation you can do when you are tied into Project Wonderful, folks.

That said, it is FAR more readers than I have on the print comic, and a significant increase of readers who now support the book. I consider it a major supplement to my print program.

So, win-win.

Anyone can use stat ranking sites to figure out what traffic comics are actually getting. None of these sites are 100% accurate, but cross comparisons will give you an idea.

Clicking through there’s another interensting article regarding making a living on webcomics: how “Girl Genius” actually is succeeding:

http://icv2.com/articles/news/14551.html