I’ve run into this brick wall myself…and I’ve used the same avenues you have in promoting your strip to little or no avail. I think it all comes down to the dollars. I am not nearly as web savy as I’d like to be but I think if you had enough money to throw at it you’d be able to drum up a lot of traffic. I’m in the same boat as you with the kids and wife and I think it’s harder for guys like us than it is for a college student with nothing but time on his hands and a larger expendable income. But like you said, it’s a labor of love…and i believe as long as you make the best quality product you possibly can…people will eventually take notice.
My despondency isn’t so much that people aren’t noticing. It’s that they USED to notice and aren’t noticing ANYMORE! 🙂
I think there is a law of diminishing returns with this kind of work from a popularity standpoint. Either you break through to the audience that doesn’t otherwise read web comics and live forever or you keep plugging away until your archives become intimidating and your work less accessible. From that perspective, it makes sense that someone like John Allison would take a popular comic like Scary Go Round, end it and then start a new one in Bad Machinery.
I don’t mean to sound unappreciative of the fans that I have. Obviously I have a very dedicated core fan base that has helped to keep Theater Hopper running over the years (the success of the Year Three fund raising campaign being the most recent, clearest example of this). But it’s the casual viewers that elude me and I can’t decide if it’s worth chasing them down with advertising dollars to attract them. Sometimes I feel like that money could be spent on far more interesting things for the site.
in my humble experiences, advertising is all well and dandy, but if your comics aren’t up to snuff then the advertising won’t get you many return viewers.
personally I remember the comics without the ‘main’ characters better. the reason that I subscribed to your RSS feed back in the day, and bare with me, was a comic that was somehow star wars related, and they were on a trade federation ship. that was funny to me, so I subscribed.
the greatest bump that any of my sites have ever gotten was when stumbledupon, digg,reddit, et al picked up on a post and went hog wild with it. sure, my server caught on fire and I had to put my beer down to fix things, but it’s always nice to get the social media in on things.
good grief that sounded much harsher then I was shooting for. take everythign I said above with a grain of salt and a bit of “well that’s just my opinion, man”
No worries, Tiki. I know where you’re coming from.
Sometimes I wonder if my comics aren’t up to snuff. Clearly, without quality material, there’s no reason to come back. But, at the same time, I think I’ve been producing some solid stuff.
I’ve tried my best to use social media to promote the comic. Twitter and Facebook have been helpful to remind existing fans to check out this site. But as far as Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit go, I’ve found you can’t force it. People need to get into the habit of sharing your links. You can’t pressure them into doing it. And if it catches on? Well, that’s just fate tossing you a cookie. Rarely does the traffic spike create long-term readers.
I personally don’t think that 1,000+ archives are too daunting. I read through more comics than that to catch up with Ctrl+Alt+Del. Your comic is great, and I wouldn’t worry about your material if I were you. I don’t know anything about web advertising, but I will be sharing more links for your comic in the future. Good luck!
I’ve only been reading your comic for a few months, and I certainly haven’t gone through all of the archives, although I’ve gone to random past pages. I really do enjoy it, and I’ve turned some of my friends onto it, too. Also, I love the Iowa references.
The syndication deal with First Showing kind of dried up after Alex wanted more original content and I didn’t have the bandwidth in my schedule to provide it. It was an okay deal while it lasted, though. Even if the strips on his site didn’t draw a bunch of traffic to my site while they were running, once they stopped appearing there, I think I gathered a few new readers from it.
There is another opportunity for syndication with a different movie blog in the works right now.
I think you might want to wait a bit longer before spending any serious amount of money on advertising, if you do go that route. I read through massive comic archives, but I know that I’m a massive webcomic geek and normal people aren’t nearly as likely to do that. I imagine what it comes down to is the comic of that day when people click the banner that takes them to the site. Either it immediately grabs them, or it doesn’t. Some might go back a few pages, but I’m not sure how necessary people view going through the archives to add a new comic.
Advertising might help, but I’m not certain you should just stick with movie related sites. Obviously, it’s a set demographic that would have the same interests as your comic, but branching out to other places could help. A lot of people who use Firefox have AdBlock anyway, so I’m not sure what other advertising routes there are.
As far as timing, I’d suggest waiting a bit longer till the stress and fatigue from the holidays are over. People are going back to work, trying to catch up on everything they missed while the holidays were going on, trying to stick to resolutions, etc. It just leads to a lack of free time. February is a pretty slow month for a lot of people, aside from Valentine’s Day. On top of that, perhaps time it so the days the ads are up you have one to two shot comics that don’t rely upon older comics to be fully understood. That or present such bizarre ideas and graphics that they just *have* to examine further to figure out wtf they’re looking at. 😀
I think the strip is as strong or stronger than ever, in terms of quality.
What brought me to Theater Hopper I believe, was a guest strip that you did for someone else and then yeah… the topical stuff hooked me.
The archives might be daunting for some but once I was hooked that gave me some incentive to buy the books.
In general you don’t seem to use a lot of inside jokes and if you do… your “about” page is really good for the quick gap filler, so I think your comic is built well for snagging readers.
Maybe an ad slogan contest (similar to the one Wes Molebash did recently except… you know… not about moms)? That would help with the “time to design/ideas” end of things…
Well, I came over here because of a guest strip you did somewhere – I just have no idea where that came from. Anyway, I’ve only been a reader for a few months and I happily pieced my way through the archives … then again, I did the same thing with Penny Arcade even more recently and those archives seem practically impenetrable. Then again, the only thing your Facebook reminders have told me is that you’re trying to pre-empt my daily webcomic check up …
Either way, I’m a new and fairly loyal fan. I enjoy reading your comics and I’d buy merch were I not a student and thus impoverished. Such is life, I suppose.
I’m just sorry I can’t remember how I found you … (It was probably a guest comic, but still …)
You have to remember that it’s not so much the quantity of readers but the quality. You just managed to rake in a ton of cash to fund your book. That is no small task and one that I wouldn’t imagine being able to pull off let alone in the time frame you did.
Fans can be a surprisingly dedicated bunch. Even with my God awful schedule I still manage to hold on to a very small cluster of diehards that keep coming back to see if I’ve bothered to update. If you have a smaller audience than before, but one that is willing to help you fulfill a project like that, you’ve got more than you realize. You’ve dropped the fat and now you’re running on an audience that is most likely 110% invested in your work and will be more receptive to interacting with you.
news aggregate sites like digg or reddit are a good way to generate a ton of cheap (ie, free) advertising. I definitely recommend you check out reddit, especially reddit.com/r/movies & reddit.com/r/comics. get involved on those boards; and upload your comics. if you take the extra time to join the community (and not just use it to promote TH) reddit will come to love you and your comic… I’ve seen it happen many times
maybe try marketing, not to people interested in movie blogs and movies in general, but to people interested in _making fun of movies_. the first thing that comes to mind is rifftrax. maybe buy some ad-space on their site, or offer some cross promotional stuff. make them some exclusive comics that they’d probably be delighted to share for free, or even guest-star on one of their tracks. see if they’re interested in trading some word of mouth… just a thought. i’d love to hear you on a rifftrax track.
You guys are giving me some really good ideas. I’m definitely bookmarking this post to come back to later.
taekwondogirl, I think you’re on point about holding off on advertising right now. It makes sense that people are still trying to get organized after the holidays. You make a good point about people coming to the site and experiencing the comic on the home page – and that the archives might not be something they dig into unless that first comic hooks them. I guess that’s the risk of advertising. Maybe that day’s comic won’t hook them, but your odd are better of at least hooking SOMEONE as opposed to not advertising at all.
Bryan, you’re right about the top comic voting sites syncing up with Theater Hopper’s boom years. Theater Hopper was number one on both Top Web Comics and buzzComix for a while. I tried going back to Top Web Comics last year, but I couldn’t crack the Top 10. It’s pretty much been overrun with anime comics and those guys take care of their own. Plus, if your banner isn’t visible in the Top 10, it’s really hard to gain any traffic from those kind of sites. There’s also a stigma in the web comics community about ranking sites. Some people see them as a crutch. Others see them as an unfair popularity contest. Girl Genius uses them, so they can’t be all bad. I don’t know. I guess I don’t look at it that way. Free advertising is free advertising. Does anyone know of any other ranking sites I could look into?
Chris, you’re absolutely right about the quality vs. quantity thing. I’m very thankful for the quality of fans that I have because I certainly wouldn’t be able to do the kind of projects outside of the comic that I want to do without them.
Deynar, I’m familiar with the movies and comics boards at Reddit (or, more specifically, the webcomics board), but can you explain in more detail how I can leverage them? I will submit my comic to Reddit every now and again inside specific categories, but you describe it kind of like a forum community. What’s the level of interaction required to get in good with them? Is it commenting on others links or something else?
Snake, I feel like I have a pretty strong network of other creators, but it’s difficult getting them to link to me in the way that I would prefer to be linked. I look at comics like Questionable Content or Dinosaur Comics (really all of the comics under Topataco) and how they prominently list each other’s links on the home page. I’ve tried to do that with the comics I like, but have trouble getting people to return the favor. I need to maybe be a little more persistent about that in the future.
asiansteve, that’s a great idea about advertising to people who like to make FUN of movies! I think that’s an important distinction above simply advertising with sites that cover movies. Boy, I’d love to do an episode of RiffTrax. That’s like instant immortality! But I think those guys script their recordings pretty closely. Makes me wonder if they’d be interested in that kind of collaboration. I suppose it couldn’t hurt to ask! But, yeah… I think I need to find movie sites with a sense of humor. Film Drunk comes to mind. Cracked.com actually has a lot of movie coverage. Do you guys know of any other movie sites like that?
One thing I’m noticing from the comments here are the number of new readers saying they found Theater Hopper through guest comics. First of all, thanks for coming to the site! Second, I think guest comics are something I should really concentrate on. Every year, I make the same resolution to do more guest comics. Last year I told myself to do one guest comic a month and send them out regardless of if people use them. But I am notoriously unreliable when it comes to drawing them – even when people ask me to do it – because I get very self-conscious about handling another person’s characters. I feel like I need to read an entire comic’s archive before even attempting one. I need to get over that mental block, because I think that would be the fastest way of attracting new readers and a treat for existing fans as well.
I can’t quite recall how I started reading this strip, but I think it happened a few years back during one of the crossovers with you and Joe’s comics. Perhaps look into that again, as it’s fun at the same time.
With the top webcomics, I really liked it when you continued the joke or had a side sketch related to the comics, and I always voted to see it. That’s pretty much the only time I vote for a comic, and I imagine it’s a pretty common agreement amongst other people.
I was thinking about it at work, and another thing regarding timing popped into my head. With the advertising, I really think the movie parody idea would be a great way to get people to click out of curiosity. Perhaps do some advertising once Book 3 is released, so not only do they see an amusing, clever take on their favorite movie but realize, “Oh hey, he has a third book coming out? This might be worth looking into further!”
What about getting a deviant art account and posting the highest rated strips on there under numerous tags? I find that a lot of webcomics I read are ones I just stumbled upon while doing a search on that site. Also what about using multiple words in the url for each strip so it gets found easier on Google?
Interesting when you mention your boom years – I think you might try drumming up more interest on sites like Facebook and Twitter, seems like there’s more people there nowadays.
Also, in your statistics, did you take RSS into account? I ‘surf’ in the traditional sense much, much less than I used to due to Google’s RSS reader.
I’ve run into this brick wall myself…and I’ve used the same avenues you have in promoting your strip to little or no avail. I think it all comes down to the dollars. I am not nearly as web savy as I’d like to be but I think if you had enough money to throw at it you’d be able to drum up a lot of traffic. I’m in the same boat as you with the kids and wife and I think it’s harder for guys like us than it is for a college student with nothing but time on his hands and a larger expendable income. But like you said, it’s a labor of love…and i believe as long as you make the best quality product you possibly can…people will eventually take notice.
My despondency isn’t so much that people aren’t noticing. It’s that they USED to notice and aren’t noticing ANYMORE! 🙂
I think there is a law of diminishing returns with this kind of work from a popularity standpoint. Either you break through to the audience that doesn’t otherwise read web comics and live forever or you keep plugging away until your archives become intimidating and your work less accessible. From that perspective, it makes sense that someone like John Allison would take a popular comic like Scary Go Round, end it and then start a new one in Bad Machinery.
I don’t mean to sound unappreciative of the fans that I have. Obviously I have a very dedicated core fan base that has helped to keep Theater Hopper running over the years (the success of the Year Three fund raising campaign being the most recent, clearest example of this). But it’s the casual viewers that elude me and I can’t decide if it’s worth chasing them down with advertising dollars to attract them. Sometimes I feel like that money could be spent on far more interesting things for the site.
in my humble experiences, advertising is all well and dandy, but if your comics aren’t up to snuff then the advertising won’t get you many return viewers.
personally I remember the comics without the ‘main’ characters better. the reason that I subscribed to your RSS feed back in the day, and bare with me, was a comic that was somehow star wars related, and they were on a trade federation ship. that was funny to me, so I subscribed.
the greatest bump that any of my sites have ever gotten was when stumbledupon, digg,reddit, et al picked up on a post and went hog wild with it. sure, my server caught on fire and I had to put my beer down to fix things, but it’s always nice to get the social media in on things.
good grief that sounded much harsher then I was shooting for. take everythign I said above with a grain of salt and a bit of “well that’s just my opinion, man”
No worries, Tiki. I know where you’re coming from.
Sometimes I wonder if my comics aren’t up to snuff. Clearly, without quality material, there’s no reason to come back. But, at the same time, I think I’ve been producing some solid stuff.
I’ve tried my best to use social media to promote the comic. Twitter and Facebook have been helpful to remind existing fans to check out this site. But as far as Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit go, I’ve found you can’t force it. People need to get into the habit of sharing your links. You can’t pressure them into doing it. And if it catches on? Well, that’s just fate tossing you a cookie. Rarely does the traffic spike create long-term readers.
I personally don’t think that 1,000+ archives are too daunting. I read through more comics than that to catch up with Ctrl+Alt+Del. Your comic is great, and I wouldn’t worry about your material if I were you. I don’t know anything about web advertising, but I will be sharing more links for your comic in the future. Good luck!
What happened with that thing you had with first showing? It seemed like a good idea…
I’ve only been reading your comic for a few months, and I certainly haven’t gone through all of the archives, although I’ve gone to random past pages. I really do enjoy it, and I’ve turned some of my friends onto it, too. Also, I love the Iowa references.
The syndication deal with First Showing kind of dried up after Alex wanted more original content and I didn’t have the bandwidth in my schedule to provide it. It was an okay deal while it lasted, though. Even if the strips on his site didn’t draw a bunch of traffic to my site while they were running, once they stopped appearing there, I think I gathered a few new readers from it.
There is another opportunity for syndication with a different movie blog in the works right now.
I think you might want to wait a bit longer before spending any serious amount of money on advertising, if you do go that route. I read through massive comic archives, but I know that I’m a massive webcomic geek and normal people aren’t nearly as likely to do that. I imagine what it comes down to is the comic of that day when people click the banner that takes them to the site. Either it immediately grabs them, or it doesn’t. Some might go back a few pages, but I’m not sure how necessary people view going through the archives to add a new comic.
Advertising might help, but I’m not certain you should just stick with movie related sites. Obviously, it’s a set demographic that would have the same interests as your comic, but branching out to other places could help. A lot of people who use Firefox have AdBlock anyway, so I’m not sure what other advertising routes there are.
As far as timing, I’d suggest waiting a bit longer till the stress and fatigue from the holidays are over. People are going back to work, trying to catch up on everything they missed while the holidays were going on, trying to stick to resolutions, etc. It just leads to a lack of free time. February is a pretty slow month for a lot of people, aside from Valentine’s Day. On top of that, perhaps time it so the days the ads are up you have one to two shot comics that don’t rely upon older comics to be fully understood. That or present such bizarre ideas and graphics that they just *have* to examine further to figure out wtf they’re looking at. 😀
Just a few quick thoughts…
I think the strip is as strong or stronger than ever, in terms of quality.
What brought me to Theater Hopper I believe, was a guest strip that you did for someone else and then yeah… the topical stuff hooked me.
The archives might be daunting for some but once I was hooked that gave me some incentive to buy the books.
In general you don’t seem to use a lot of inside jokes and if you do… your “about” page is really good for the quick gap filler, so I think your comic is built well for snagging readers.
Maybe an ad slogan contest (similar to the one Wes Molebash did recently except… you know… not about moms)? That would help with the “time to design/ideas” end of things…
Well, I came over here because of a guest strip you did somewhere – I just have no idea where that came from. Anyway, I’ve only been a reader for a few months and I happily pieced my way through the archives … then again, I did the same thing with Penny Arcade even more recently and those archives seem practically impenetrable. Then again, the only thing your Facebook reminders have told me is that you’re trying to pre-empt my daily webcomic check up …
Either way, I’m a new and fairly loyal fan. I enjoy reading your comics and I’d buy merch were I not a student and thus impoverished. Such is life, I suppose.
I’m just sorry I can’t remember how I found you … (It was probably a guest comic, but still …)
You have to remember that it’s not so much the quantity of readers but the quality. You just managed to rake in a ton of cash to fund your book. That is no small task and one that I wouldn’t imagine being able to pull off let alone in the time frame you did.
Fans can be a surprisingly dedicated bunch. Even with my God awful schedule I still manage to hold on to a very small cluster of diehards that keep coming back to see if I’ve bothered to update. If you have a smaller audience than before, but one that is willing to help you fulfill a project like that, you’ve got more than you realize. You’ve dropped the fat and now you’re running on an audience that is most likely 110% invested in your work and will be more receptive to interacting with you.
news aggregate sites like digg or reddit are a good way to generate a ton of cheap (ie, free) advertising. I definitely recommend you check out reddit, especially reddit.com/r/movies & reddit.com/r/comics. get involved on those boards; and upload your comics. if you take the extra time to join the community (and not just use it to promote TH) reddit will come to love you and your comic… I’ve seen it happen many times
Keep trading links/ads with other webcomics you like and who like you. That’s how I find most comics.
maybe try marketing, not to people interested in movie blogs and movies in general, but to people interested in _making fun of movies_. the first thing that comes to mind is rifftrax. maybe buy some ad-space on their site, or offer some cross promotional stuff. make them some exclusive comics that they’d probably be delighted to share for free, or even guest-star on one of their tracks. see if they’re interested in trading some word of mouth… just a thought. i’d love to hear you on a rifftrax track.
You guys are giving me some really good ideas. I’m definitely bookmarking this post to come back to later.
taekwondogirl, I think you’re on point about holding off on advertising right now. It makes sense that people are still trying to get organized after the holidays. You make a good point about people coming to the site and experiencing the comic on the home page – and that the archives might not be something they dig into unless that first comic hooks them. I guess that’s the risk of advertising. Maybe that day’s comic won’t hook them, but your odd are better of at least hooking SOMEONE as opposed to not advertising at all.
Bryan, you’re right about the top comic voting sites syncing up with Theater Hopper’s boom years. Theater Hopper was number one on both Top Web Comics and buzzComix for a while. I tried going back to Top Web Comics last year, but I couldn’t crack the Top 10. It’s pretty much been overrun with anime comics and those guys take care of their own. Plus, if your banner isn’t visible in the Top 10, it’s really hard to gain any traffic from those kind of sites. There’s also a stigma in the web comics community about ranking sites. Some people see them as a crutch. Others see them as an unfair popularity contest. Girl Genius uses them, so they can’t be all bad. I don’t know. I guess I don’t look at it that way. Free advertising is free advertising. Does anyone know of any other ranking sites I could look into?
Chris, you’re absolutely right about the quality vs. quantity thing. I’m very thankful for the quality of fans that I have because I certainly wouldn’t be able to do the kind of projects outside of the comic that I want to do without them.
Deynar, I’m familiar with the movies and comics boards at Reddit (or, more specifically, the webcomics board), but can you explain in more detail how I can leverage them? I will submit my comic to Reddit every now and again inside specific categories, but you describe it kind of like a forum community. What’s the level of interaction required to get in good with them? Is it commenting on others links or something else?
Snake, I feel like I have a pretty strong network of other creators, but it’s difficult getting them to link to me in the way that I would prefer to be linked. I look at comics like Questionable Content or Dinosaur Comics (really all of the comics under Topataco) and how they prominently list each other’s links on the home page. I’ve tried to do that with the comics I like, but have trouble getting people to return the favor. I need to maybe be a little more persistent about that in the future.
asiansteve, that’s a great idea about advertising to people who like to make FUN of movies! I think that’s an important distinction above simply advertising with sites that cover movies. Boy, I’d love to do an episode of RiffTrax. That’s like instant immortality! But I think those guys script their recordings pretty closely. Makes me wonder if they’d be interested in that kind of collaboration. I suppose it couldn’t hurt to ask! But, yeah… I think I need to find movie sites with a sense of humor. Film Drunk comes to mind. Cracked.com actually has a lot of movie coverage. Do you guys know of any other movie sites like that?
One thing I’m noticing from the comments here are the number of new readers saying they found Theater Hopper through guest comics. First of all, thanks for coming to the site! Second, I think guest comics are something I should really concentrate on. Every year, I make the same resolution to do more guest comics. Last year I told myself to do one guest comic a month and send them out regardless of if people use them. But I am notoriously unreliable when it comes to drawing them – even when people ask me to do it – because I get very self-conscious about handling another person’s characters. I feel like I need to read an entire comic’s archive before even attempting one. I need to get over that mental block, because I think that would be the fastest way of attracting new readers and a treat for existing fans as well.
This is all great. Please keep the ideas coming!
I can’t quite recall how I started reading this strip, but I think it happened a few years back during one of the crossovers with you and Joe’s comics. Perhaps look into that again, as it’s fun at the same time.
With the top webcomics, I really liked it when you continued the joke or had a side sketch related to the comics, and I always voted to see it. That’s pretty much the only time I vote for a comic, and I imagine it’s a pretty common agreement amongst other people.
I was thinking about it at work, and another thing regarding timing popped into my head. With the advertising, I really think the movie parody idea would be a great way to get people to click out of curiosity. Perhaps do some advertising once Book 3 is released, so not only do they see an amusing, clever take on their favorite movie but realize, “Oh hey, he has a third book coming out? This might be worth looking into further!”
What about getting a deviant art account and posting the highest rated strips on there under numerous tags? I find that a lot of webcomics I read are ones I just stumbled upon while doing a search on that site. Also what about using multiple words in the url for each strip so it gets found easier on Google?
Interesting when you mention your boom years – I think you might try drumming up more interest on sites like Facebook and Twitter, seems like there’s more people there nowadays.
Also, in your statistics, did you take RSS into account? I ‘surf’ in the traditional sense much, much less than I used to due to Google’s RSS reader.