ozoneocean
By some project Wonderful ads. They're cheap and easy to use.
If you want to retain that position and get new readers it's the best way.

Yunno, I just tried that a couple of days ago! I was initially underwhelmed by the twenty-something unique clicks my ad was averaging, but I can see where it could be beneficial in a long-term perspective. If some of those uniques become regular viewers, and I kept picking up a couple dozen every day, for an extended period of time, and had several different ads on several different sites... yeah, that could add up to something substantial over the course of a year or two...

...As long as I'm willing to pay for it. And as long as I'm willing to constantly churn out new ads when the old ones get stale. Which I'm not. So it probably isn't worth it for me, but for a comic just trying to break the top 100 I'd definitely recommend going that route. You're right, they're cheap, easy, and I'm sure effective enough given time to work.

OzoneOcean
I don't have access to referring site data and I can't get you the unique or page view numbers for everyone either since that'd involve the exhausting task of going through each and every comic stat listing separately to get it, and with so many comics on this site that'd be impossible. besides, stat data for individual comics is private and they'd have to agree for me to give it up

Pity that. All it would take would be some analytics code and we'd have it covered. Funny thing is the community would only benefit to know who's going where and viewing what within the site and from outside the side. It would allow creators to get a better idea of where to advertise and build up demographic information so it'd be easier for the Duck to sell ads. Heck, even advertisers could learn from the community, create better and more clickable ads, which means more money for the Duck which means more features for us.

I just got 200 fewer pageviews today than average, but moved up two spaces in the rankings :-) So, I guess it is all about unique hits.

One plus that manga has is that most people who love manga ONLY love manga, they click all the other comic styles off when searching. Of course, the downside to manga is there's REALLY a lot of poorly done comics too. But, I manage to stay in the top 23 (1st page) of the browse page, with only manga selected (#20 manga today, actually).

I think it's probably that way with Adult comics, too... people looking for adult comics are usually typing with one hand, and click all the other styles off except for Adult :-)

left handed mouse use, tricky.

As for the mang comment, tell me about it, there is so much bad manga style I tend to filter all manga out. I do PW stuff in fits and bursts, it seems to work a bit no flood gates of hits but I do see a steady improvement. Well as long as I place them well. It pays for itself now which is cool, my funds fluctuate but never drop for long.

Someone
I just got 200 fewer pageviews today than average, but moved up two spaces in the rankings :-) So, I guess it is all about unique hits.

i seem to remember ozone saying it is based over a 7 day average so it may not drop straight away.

Genejoke
i seem to remember ozone saying it is based over a 7 day average so it may not drop straight away.

It's also competitive; it depends on how well the other comics are doing. If your comic has a really slow day, but the site in general is having a slow day, you might still move up if you're doing better than the comics around you. Likewise, if you're doing really good but others are doing better, you can lose a spot.

On Thursday, my comic got a ton more views than it did on Wednesday... and it still dropped a spot. Friday, it got several hundred less than on Thursday, and moved back up a spot. So when my comic was doing well, the next-ranked comic did better, and when my comic did less well, the higher-ranked comic did even worse. What matters is your comic's relative performance, which there's really no way to gauge because you can't know how well other comics are doing.

Tim Wellman
I think it's probably that way with Adult comics, too... people looking for adult comics are usually typing with one hand, and click all the other styles off except for Adult :-)

LOL! I think there may be something to that, or at least there used to be. Back when they had the ratings displayed on the front of each comic's icon, there were days when all of the top Adult comics would just be bunched together shoulder-to-shoulder, so it couldn't be a coincidence that they were all getting roughly the same number of viewers. I'm not sure how common that was overall though, because I didn't keep very close tabs, but I observed it quite a few times. Since then, though, things seem to have spread out somewhat.