I never thought I'd be one to ever make a thread like this but I guess here I am typing these words...
On a whim(read as NJ talked me into it ) I applied to SpiderForest and this morning I found out I was accepted
So after being on CG for a long time, I'm gonna be packing up and heading over there with Avernyght. I'm still gonna be on the forums, I could never leave you guys , but my comic will just physically elsewhere.
NJ: "You know the drill, you're AWESOME!"
I am the artist formerly known as M2
That's nice.
I'd be interested to hear accounts of people who have moved on to other sites. That is, if moving has changed something regarding their recognition, readership, etc.
I moved to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish; the only ads on my site are ones I put there myself. CONTROL FREAKS ARE GO!
I have accomplished this. Now I may dwell in obscurity.
Caught in the headlamp glare of your own blinding vanity/Mesmerised by the stare of your shallow personality
Gorging the junk food of flattery you drag your fat ego around/Everyone floored by the battering you give to whoever's around
Oh Narcissus you petulant child admiring yourself in the curve of my eyes/Oh Narcissus you angel beguiled unsated by self you do nothing but die
TheSuburbanLetdown wrote:So, a few more of us leave. Coolness.
see I saw you do it and then thought "Oh now i have too!"
you trend setter you!
ps update your delicious delicious comic also I need to fanart you up
Heh, yeah. Humbug and Jtigerclaw came with too, as we're all in the same group.
I have a pencilled update since I've been busy and couldn't get it done. Many readers tell me that they like seeing these in-progress ones so I post them when I'm not done.
Speaking as someone who was never on CG to begin with... (yes, I only hang out here because you all are just that cool) I'd be interested in hearing if there's a real difference. I'm not about to MOVE to CG by any means, but I'm wondering if the pre-existing fanbase / collective might have helped.
K-Dawg wrote:NJ has left? Hooray I am freeee! No longer will she crush me in utter defeat!
Oh you haven't gotten rid of me just yet Dawg. I'll still be around with my mirror site. Plus I got ya cornered on the Milk forums. I'm sure you got aaaall excited thinking now was your chance to love up Orion, but your sick little fantasies will not breath life!
Another 'collective' hosted on dreamhost? geez guys.
I'm going to put things in perspective for you, and it's not pretty:
(If you've read the similar argument about comicdish, this is something new BTW)
First off. NJ, alone, could probably make a decent amount of advertising revenue to go solo.
You may have noticed some of the additional advertising chunks on the comicgenesis site, these ad blocks are optional if you want to go into the revenue sharing program (yes it's coming back, was actually scheduled to come back with the G4 promo (see bar above) and upon me completing some backend work.) They can be activated with the ***advertisement_160x600*** and ***advertisement_300x250*** , anyone can start using these anytime, but we haven't officially pegged a "start counting" date for it. Since CG (and Keenspot on the entirety) has a large volume of traffic, we do get significant advertising revenue. Ad networks won't even talk to you if you don't have a half million page impressions per month. The exceptions being google adsense and project wonderful which work on a bidding scheme (With google paying poorly since it's context sensitive and most comics have little in the way of text.)
Second. It actually hurts you to have a mirror site if you are actually trying to make money from the site, if anything you should have a mirror site on your personal site artist's site that you only flip on when your primary site is down. The ad networks look squarely at this part http://subdomain.domain.com/subdirectory , if you do not have your own vanity domain name, you are worth little to an ad network because they can not tell your site from any other site hosted at that service. This is why you have to be part of a large site (eg comicgenesis, druckduck,etc) to take advantage of the cross promotion to build your audience, in which the large site can and should share the advertising revenue. But advertising revenue has to actually exceed operating costs which is why 'free' hosting sites exist to begin with. You can usually put the same advertising code on all your sites and mirrors, but since the ad network is going to see different sites with substantially different volumes in traffic, you won't get the higher paying stuff if you can get onto an ad network at all.
Third The current 'trend' appears to be a varient of brand/co-branding, if you have your own domain and are paying for your own hosting, you should just shop around and see what benefit you get by being a part of any 'community' at all. Most communities quickly form and then when visitors stop coming, they abandon the comic.
Grab the list of comics from spiderforest. 11 comics updated in the last 2 months, out of 26. The remaining sites are either on hiatus or presumed dead. Nearly This really is not that different from keenspot, comicgenesis, drunkduck, however if the sites are not operating, then should be pulled from primary cross promotion (eg, the front page or main list) otherwise people will get fustrated with visiting sites that appear to be abandoned. On CG none of the cross promotion systems show sites that haven't been updated in 30 days. Thereby gauranteeing that anything clicked on will have at the very least been updated in the last 30 days. (Exception being the guide which uses different formulas.)
Fourth, going back to the point about shared hosting environments, it is usually a waste to pay for a site if your site doesn't do at least 1 megabit and can saturate near 10megabits, as the minimum you are going to get for a standalone server is 10 megabits, at maybe 300$/mo , if your site doesn't put out 10 megabits, then shared environments are for you. However shared environments can, and are slow when any of the following are true:
1) slashdotted
2) php enabled (and someone has a bad script)
3) users don't know how to compress their images, resulting in lumpy transfer rates.
4) The hosting environment oversells the bandwidth by a huge factor.
But if any of the following are true, you should not use a shared hosting environment (or join any hosted collectives):
1) You have > than 50000 vistors
2) Your site uses more than 10mbits of bandwidth (most hardware configurations top out at 25, with the disk drives being the bottleneck)
3) You insist on large images for comics.
And finally.
I'm not railing against other collectives, however I've seen no less than a half dozen fail pretty quickly as what happens is they form (usually from CG comics), but once they go off and host their comics somewhere else, one of the following happens:
1) Almost Everyone loses interest, this is apparent when more than 50% of the comics do not keep to their update schedules or go on hiatus.
2) Whoever was in charge of admin'ing or moderating the forums disappear
3) No significant cross-promotion beween the sites, resulting in a net reduction in visitors.
**4) They forget or stop renewing the domains, so after a while the entire thing goes pop.
**This is why we aren't doing vanity domains anymore on CG. Unless you have an actual site setup, ready to go, use the domain registrar's autoforwarding (not stealth forwarding) to your site. On last cleanup more than half of the vanity domains had been abandoned or taken by domain campers once they expire, thus rending the sites unreachable.
Idealy, if you want to be part of more than one group, co-brand with that group, but don't host two copies of your comic. Examples:
KEZ (Who appears to do the webdesign for spiderforest) also co-manages a keenspot comic, clicking on KEZ on that comic sends you to warofwinds which is a SF comic
Komiyan (Who was once on CG) is on keenspot, and cobrands with cornstalker (Look for the cornstalker newsbox)
Same with Sortelli of elfonlyinn
And keep it sane... if there are too many ads on the page then it just slows down. As a baseline rule, if the area covered with ads is more than the area covered with comic content, it's too much.
Online comics are still in an infancy stage really, and haven't taken off like youtube, because time commitment and effort is required, something which 30 second attention spans do not do well at. Youtube and photobucket works because you can just snap a photo or video with your 99$ digital camera and upload it, no hassle in between.
There really needs to be more cross promotion between online and offline media.
In closing, the point of this was that I keep seeing these small collectives as death sentances to the comics that move their entire site there. As much as they are good ideas in theory, ultimately they need to have a few anchor comics of very high traffic in order for there to be any benefit to the other comics in the collective, but ultimately you may as well go solo and charge them to advertise on your site. :p
I've been hosted on SF since 2006, and I THINK the collective has been around since 2004, so I don't think we're going to die out any time soon. I've got a personal stake in it, and with admin abilities, I also make sure everyone else is happy to best of my ability.
Yes, we're on Dreamhost (and I'm not too happy about that, btw), but the last host we were on did not approve of our online updating feature, then booted us off without explanation. I trust Ran Jado (the founder and head admin) researched places quite well before settling on Dreamhost. My site's been down maybe 4 hours this entire year, so I'm not gonna complain.
I certainly agree all our members ought to have their own domain though. I do, so does Cat Legend, NJ, and Avernyght. Ran JUST put up the entire list of comics I think today, and yeah, it should be separated by regularly updating/no longer updating, definitely. There's so much going on right now, I can't keep up with everything!
I DO maintain a mirror here, though it is always a couple weeks behind the main site, and never used unless the main site is down. Splitting views between two equally updating sites is a very bad thing indeed.
I certainly don't mean to jump on the defensive here, sorry. When I put my effort into something though, I don't let people down.
I basically was looking for something with a few more options than CG, but still free as I'm still a student and not looking to pay for my own hosting yet. Spider Forest was a good solution for that. I was aware going in that most of the comics weren't huge or extremely active. I came mostly for the hosting feature of it, it provides what I want for now.
) I applied to SpiderForest and this morning I found out I was accepted 
, but my comic will just physically elsewhere.
