Every time you post a comic page, your comic goes to the front page and everyone who has it favourited gets alerted and you can tell people on the forums and they go reading it too.
All jolly good.
But there is even more bonus to be gained!
Every page you add means every new viewer that wonders by has even more to read through, so will give you more hits.
If I have 23 pages (and I do!) and some new guy/girl wonders on, I only get 23 hits. But if I have 200 pages (and I don't) every new person adds a massive 200 hits.
Then there are people who decide to recap and go through the archive, the more pages I have the more hits I will get from them
This means my page will get higher and higher ranked, so people searching will find it, and thus give me even MORE hits.
And so on, and so on.
Then there is step 2
Then step three is profit.
So the moral is, posting pages is exponentially rewarding!

harkovast
If I have 23 pages (and I do!) and some new guy/girl wonders on, I only get 23 hits. But if I have 200 pages (and I don't) every new person adds a massive 200 hits.

Lovely thoughts, but this doesn't always (or even usually) work that way. While most new readers will happily go through an archive of 20 or 30 pages (even for a less spectacular comic), once you hit triple digits, you will actually "scare off" many potential readers. Even if you have an amazing comic, it's quite a commitment to go back and read those archives. Some people might start trying to follow along with new updates only, but if you have an in-depth story, they might not comment until they figure out what is going on or will stop reading because they can't follow along.

I know when I find a new comic I'm interested in, if it is short, I'll read through it when I find it, but if it is longer, I stick it on a mental "to do" list of sorts and have to decide if it is worth the time it would take to read it and, if so, I have to decide when I will have the time and attention to do so.

(I have come to the realization that the longer my comic gets the less likely I am to pick up new readers. There's a bell curve or something in regards to comic length vs. new readers. Word of advice: Don't make a comic for the purpose of page hits. Just make your comic.)

Usedbooks, there is a better reason to do things then page hits?
Impossible!
I don't get out of bed unless I believe there are a couple of page hits in it for me!
And Anyone not willing to read 200 pages in one go is a quitter!
I demand my readers be made of sterner stuff!

Being more serious, I would imagine that if you have a catchy looking opening to a comic, people will look at the first couple of pages, decide it is interesting, and then be bothered to sit through the rest. I think if you can hook folk with the first couple of pages, they will be more willing to keep going despite the daunting task of squillions of pages ahead.

Or maybe they will just not be bothered.
Either way, there is nothing to do but keep posting those pages, so I might as well have a positive view of what is going to happen.
Now excuse me, I'm coming down, I need another hit....
*Goes off to stare at his number of page views*

harkovast
Being more serious, I would imagine that if you have a catchy looking opening to a comic, people will look at the first couple of pages, decide it is interesting, and then be bothered to sit through the rest. I think if you can hook folk with the first couple of pages, they will be more willing to keep going despite the daunting task of squillions of pages ahead.

Actually, I suspect that's only true when your comic is still very new and does not have a huge archive.

Many readers of webcomics tend to start at the most recent page and then work backwards. It's therefore the last few pages that are the key to drawing in new readers. Only if they are able to capture a reader's interest will they go back and start from the beginning.

It's a bizarre phenomenon but a good incentive to make sure your most recent page is always at least as good as your first!

So every page has to be as good as every other one?
Yikes! No pressure then.
Do most people just read from the last page backwards?
I normally go back to he first page and see if it looks any good and read from there for a while to see if I it can hold my interest or not.
Am I just weird?

harkovast
So every page has to be as good as every other one?
Yikes! No pressure then.
Do most people just read from the last page backwards?
I normally go back to he first page and see if it looks any good and read from there for a while to see if I it can hold my interest or not.
Am I just weird?

When I first started promoting my comic Shades on the web, I always used to ensure my links would direct people to the beginning of the latest chapter where I always put a "Story so Far" summary. I found that readers in webland didn't even want that ... Obviously everybody's different but it does seem that the majority of webcomic readers are so used to being directed to the most recent page that that's where they expect to start.

If they like what they see, they'll click the Back button and read the previous page. If they like that, they'll do it again. If, after a few pages, they're still liking what they see, they may then go back to the first page and start reading through the archives in the correct order! Not everyone is like that but, from what I've seen both here at DD and elsewhere, that does seem to be the norm!

I thought you were going to talk about improving your art lol, that's what I like about every new update. If you love pageviews spend 3$ on projectwonderful sometime.

But usedbooks is right, I'll shy away from huge archives, mainly if I see the new art is poor. If the new art is good then I'll know the comic improves throughout.

From what I've found good art is what keeps readers staying even if your story is sucking. :P

You're math went a bit wayward.

But carry on anyway, son.

If I paid too much attention to the pageviews (other than checking them out of curiosity) I'd stop drawing this instant... oh wait, I finished the storyline. Nevermind that, I'd stop working on making the book printable AND on planning potential sequels and other unrelated comics.

Sure, lots of pageviews are nice as you know a lot of people are reading, that's like saying the only thing that matters is how many copies of your album sell.

Maybe this makes me shallow, but I take tremendous pleasure in seeing my little DD icon go red for a new comment or seeing that my comic got loads of views on one day.
I suppose if page views meant nothing to me, I'd just keep the stuff on my own computer at home.
But I know they are not the be all and end all, and I will keep doing my comic just as I want it regardless of the opinions of others....but they are a welcome bonus!
So now you all know how to make me happy.

DAJB

harkovast
Being more serious, I would imagine that if you have a catchy looking opening to a comic, people will look at the first couple of pages, decide it is interesting, and then be bothered to sit through the rest. I think if you can hook folk with the first couple of pages, they will be more willing to keep going despite the daunting task of squillions of pages ahead.

Actually, I suspect that's only true when your comic is still very new and does not have a huge archive.

Many readers of webcomics tend to start at the most recent page and then work backwards. It's therefore the last few pages that are the key to drawing in new readers. Only if they are able to capture a reader's interest will they go back and start from the beginning.

It's a bizarre phenomenon but a good incentive to make sure your most recent page is always at least as good as your first!

This is how I work with new webcomics. Every page has to capture a new reader because when I see a boring page in a comic I've never read, I'll instantly click the red "x" and never see it again (and the comic could have been the greatest thing to grace the internet). First impressions in webcomics are THE most important thing a budding creator has to deal with. Every page should be your very best and even if you're drawing a story comic you should try your absolutely hardest to make every scene, even exposition scenes, interesting.

I think my pages are all pretty interesting so far.
I think I'd be happy to show off any of them as an example to people (though I still insist it is better if you start at page 1!)
So I can live with that idea, I think what I've done all stands up pretty well so far.
On a related note-
Ever wonder how many people look at one page of your comic, disregard it and move on?

I try to make all my pages interesting on their own (especially as both my comics are still in their prologue stages lol), even if they don't make sense.

I heard that people like comics with big archives because there will be a lot of substance to go through. I guess that only works if it's a truly substantial comic, with solid storylines and characters. Honestly, it depends on a few things for me.

(1) Ease of reading. Sometimes comics are easier to read because of format or writing style. I can blow through them quickly AND remember what happened a month later. Those are good comics.

(2) Newness/shortness.

If they have either of those things I'll probably read them right away, otherwise I'll fav them to come back to later or forget about them (even if they are worth my time).

Also, I was going to say all my pages get better every time because of all the time spent improving between them, lol. I love seeing my art improve so much but pages from earlier this year are starting to look kind of iffy, heh. And I need to be faster. (Oh well! Don't worry about it! Just press on!)

Oh goody! I get to play the spoiler. I think that a huge archive is cake and ice cream when reading a gag-a-day concept strip. Because you don't have to pay attention to the ins and outs of an unfolding plot, you can just relax and have fun reading the archive.

It's when one encounters a strip with long stories that the reader intimidation factor kicks into gear. One may love the art work and the characters but it takes time and commitment to wade through a vast archive full of ongoing stories.

That aside, I agree that the normal methodology seems to be for a new reader to look over the last three to five pages and only then go back to the beginning to read to the end.

In case I didn't make my reasoning clear, since the gag-a-day style strip doesn't generally sweat the continuity issue there's far less pressure on the reader to faithfully pay attention to plot or characterization or even character names. One can just enjoy the artwork and the jokes and so is more likely to wade through a significant archive.

So, as usual, what sort of strip or 'toon one is talking about, does make a difference.

I totally agree with everyone on the triple digits deal xD. Although i've been surprised on several occasions, that many readers have actually gone through and read the entire archive of my first comic (that's a little over 600 pages and growing!) Lately, this has been the case xD. My other comic is newer and hasn't reached the over 100 pages phase yet, so I've noticed much less hesitation for readers to browse the archive a little :p.

I know for myself, if the story comes across as being intriguing, I don't have a problem with going through an entire archive just catch up.

For me, I always go back to the start of a comic to read from there (I'm a freak I guess) but if the first through pages look cheap or crappy, I usually wont bother to read through a long archive.
That is why I think it is odd when people make a huge long comic, but leave the crude, weakly drawn bit at the start in place, rather then just reediting it to improve it. You can still save the picture for nostalga, you just don't need to show it as page one of your comic if it is pants.
Basically, if it is good, I will happily read 500+ pages of it.
If it is crap, you will be lucky if I finish to the bottom of the page.

It's only relatively recent that it was even possible to go back and edit your early pages without a fifty-fifty risk of losing all your comments with the page change. Then, too there is the judgment factor.

One famous DD cartoonist, Inkmonkey, was rather bad in the early years. He had a huge archive and it would have been utterly impractical to go back and rework all his stuff when, later, his artwork became much better.

Hmm, might not have got me as a reader then.
Unless the front page stuff was so clearly awesome that I would be willing to wade through the crappy early stuff to get there?

harkovast
Hmm, might not have got me as a reader then.
Unless the front page stuff was so clearly awesome that I would be willing to wade through the crappy early stuff to get there?

I don't know Harkovast. I don't want to rewrite history here due to nostalgia. In my memory his artwork remained fairly rough and yet it was very obvious that he was trying his heart out and struggling to improve every day in every way.

I any event, his stuff hovered in the DD's top five for years. He had an absolutely huge fan base. We all have different tastes and different tolerances for art work and writing. Inkmonkey's huge fan base simply did not care that the artwork was rough in those early strips and that's because he was such a good storyteller.

There is at least one other DD artist that started with a strip elsewhere and made her rep there before ever migrating to the Duck. Again, her artwork was rather primitive in the beginning, but improved over time. In her case there was enough charm in her early work, however, that going back and 'fixing' things would have been a shame.

So it goes. I think that it's probably a good thing for the average artist to go back and fix early errors but most of us are amateurs and have only so much time and energy to give to our free art. After a while, some of us struggle just to keep a strip or comic book going at all, and so going back to do housekeeping work on the early stuff is simply out of the question. So it goes.

Well, if the writing is awesome, then that is different.
True awesomeness probably signs through. Order of the Stick may be the best web comic of them all and it has almost no art work at all!
In reality I take each comic on a case by case basis, I don't apply hard and fast rules, but the early stuff does need to be good (even if the art is weak, there has to be some spark to make me want to get into it).

I've been pondering redrawing the early pages. But I'm also aware that if I did that, I wouldn't know where to stop. I'd have to redo at least the first entire chapter, and then at least first half of the second chapter to make the art and coloring more consistent (stopped using messy and scratchy coloring halfway through). As it is right now, other than the lettering, it serves sort of a document of my progress. I know that in five years the ENTIRE book will look like shit, might as well wait couple more and THEN redraw it entirely if I feel like it's necessary.

So I try to approach it from this angle. Is the art SUFFICIENT to tell the story as it is? Yes. Well, then it's time to move on and make sure that the later books I do look better than this one. I'll just finish the second half of the b&w edition and be on my way.

Hey, I once, in my younger days, had access to the collected works of Charlie Brown “Peanuts” I’m here to tell you—it was hard to recognized the characters, they had changed so much over the time frame involved! Doonesbury is yet another example of the artist’s evolution. Doonesbury today is the sharp commentary it always was, but the early stuff was so funny it had me in stitches.
I have wondered about the whole reader ‘fall-off’ concept for a while, because I know that for me, reading a new comic archive is a serious commitment. To be fair, I will read through an archive if the story is really good—and sometimes—to be fair, even if it isn’t (though I usually finish feeling a bit disgusted with myself for ‘wasting’ time). On the flip side of that. I took down the early issues of Robot Wars when I published them. Then a year later I reposted them because the site seemed so incomplete without them. Darn if my ratings didn’t go up significantly! So that’s a litmus test of a sort. I only have a couple hundred pages up, so I’m not hanging with the looong yard dogs yet…but soon.

Art is not the be all and end all, but if the early pages are genuinely crappy or have obvious flaws, it just seems like they should be fixed.
I jsut hope I don't become as bad as george lucas and steven spielberg and ruin all my old stuff with a crappy remastered version.