The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - March 20th, 2008
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09:10 am
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My Name Is Might Have Been: Three Weeks In
The traffic on my new webcomic, My Name Is Might Have Been, is below where my previous webcomic Home on the Strange was at this stage of development... Or, rather, it's precisely where it was. Which is to say that My Name Is Might Have Been, despite coming from a man who's authored a reasonably successful webcomic beforehand and having a co-author with some blogging weight of her own, has numbers almost identical to early HotS.
I expected this. My Name Is Might Have Been (or MNI) has a lot of uphill struggles that HotS never did, and it's interesting to look at what does (or does not) get readers over to a webcomic.
First off, Home on the Strange had a very significant advantage: It ran three times a week. If you want my idea of what the biggest factor in a successful webcomic is, well, it's clockwork regularity - and the more often you can publish, the better. You might think that "funny" is at the top, and it is indeed a close second.... But a mediocre webcomic that publishes five times a week will beat a funnier webcomic that publishes once every two weeks, whenever the creator gets around to it. If there are two equivalently funny strips, the one that comes out more often will beat it.
Why? Because the biggest uphill climb in any webcomic - hell, for any site - is getting people to come back regularly. It's my theory that most people have a small regular "trawl" of pages they visit whenever they log on. They hook up to the 'net, and then check their LJ friends' page, they look at FARK.com, they check out Star City Games, and they see what's up with Schlock Mercenary. Those pages will be viewed automatically every day, no matter what.
(Alternatively, you can set yourself up as the happy thrill - "It's Wednesday! Time for a new Penny Arcade!" And then you're conditionally on the web trawl, a special treat to devour three times a week, but still always on their mind.)
Getting on that trawl is your main goal as a content provider. Once you're on that trawl, you're almost guaranteed to be there for life. You've insinuated yourself into their Intarwebz DNA.
In any case, getting on that web trawl is, to crib from Jerry Seinfeld, like pushing over a soda machine - you can't do it all at once. You do it by creating enough worthwhile moments in their viewing that they go, "Wow, that was great. I really need to come back here." They come for the first time, they're like, "Eh, not bad, I'll check it out later." They come back later, after a set period of time, and find something else good. Then they keep coming back more and more often, up until they learn that there's something good every time, and you're IN.
But if they show up and nothing's changed, then you fail. You've given them less reason to come back: Maybe it's the same old shit. And worse, if they come back again later, they know there will be only one or two new things to look at, as opposed to the seven to twenty new things a webcomic that publishes daily will have.
People like shiny. And hence, in any given tie situation, a webcomic that publishes more often will win. It's just the way it is. And the difference between "three times a week" and "two times a week" is so huge; I can't think of a really top-tier webcomic that sets out to publish twice a week. My Name Is Might Have Been was handicapped from the get-go, simply by numbers.
And by content! The creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams, has a theory about webcomics that I partially agree with: The more closely people can look at a comic and go, "Hey, that's ME!" the more they'll like that comic. This explains why Peanuts, Garfield, and Dilbert were all successful - Peanuts tapped into that universal angst everyone feels, Garfield got everyone's laziness and snarkiness, and Dilbert was the first to acknowledge that work was the new family.
In webcomics? Well, the top comics are Penny Arcade, VG Cats, and PVP, comics about aging videogame nerds. What does that say? Well, it says that XKCD, a comic that routinely hits the universal "I thought only I felt that way" button rocketed to the top of the charts toot suite. (It explains neither Doonesbury or Order of the Stick, though.)
Home on the Strange? It was about nerds. You were preconditioned to like it from Day One, because it was about people you felt you knew, who hopefully you liked. There was no backstory to inhale, and everything was easy to digest. Whereas My Name Is Never Was is a much more alien climate; it's about a world devastated by a nuclear war, with people who have priorities that are distinctly not your own.
In fact, My Name Is Never Was is much more like a puzzle that we reveal to you one piece at a time. The fun is in having that world revealed (and it is a surprisingly deep world). Home on the Strange was about, on some level, you - and as such, you as the average viewer is going to have a much harder time warming up to My Name Is.
And Home on the Strange was also ha-ha funny, each strip packaged with a neat little sting of humor. My Name Is Might Have Been is a serious drama. Serious Dramas don't do well in comics. I've discussed why that is before in my review of Flaky Pastry, but the upshot is that when you're doing a storyline in a funny comic, the reader gets the consolation prize of a solid punchline, whether he knows who the central characters are or not. By the second strip of Hots, you didn't know who Tom Rough was, but by god he was getting his schvanzstucker burnt on a laptop heating vent, and that was funny. (Or not. I cringe at that gag these days.)
Whereas My Name Is merely has a story to carry it. If you showed up at today's strip, which I think is one of the creepier things we've done, you might be intrigued... But without the backstory and understanding who these characters are, you have no attachment. (And how much understanding of backstory or characters can you have after six strips anyway?) All we can do is accrete, making these guys as interesting as we can in each strip every day in an attempt to gain your attention. Which is odd.
And then, finally, there's the meta-story.
I knew as a creator that the Rock Band thing would be an instant turn-off to some people. Many folks would go, "Oh, wait! This isn't a Grand Serious Drama?" and immediately turn away. Many others would go, "I don't play Rock Band, so this isn't of interest to me," and tuned out. Which was fine. I expected that.
The goal of My Name Is Might Have Been is to tell a story that's not more than one big cheap Rock Band joke. Ideally, we hit that sweet spot where it makes perfect sense even if you don't know Rock Band at all, and has an extra layer if you do - perhaps it's rather stupid to compare a fledgling webcomic to a classic bit of literature as The Handmaid's Tale (which resonates a lot more if you know some of the back story about where it's set), but that's kind of our end goal.
But can you get that? No. Home on the Strange had an easy contract with the readers: Hey, we're going to show you nerds doing cute things. And by God, you can tell right away whether we're delivering. My Name Is Might Have Been has a much more complex promise it's made, and it's going to take time to show you where we're coming from, and what we're trying to do - and, most important of all, whether we can actually do it. And that's still in question.
Still, My Name Is Might Have Been isn't a failure. It can't be. I just want to tell a story with my friend. But from a traffic perspective, it's interesting to see what goes into making something that gets the eyeballs in. Artistically, I think My Name Is Never Was is far more successful than Home on the Strange was in the middle of Week #3, which gives me hope for the future that maybe it'll surpass it some day.
Yet we can only wait. And watch. Which is the glory of every webcomic, really.
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03:36 pm
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Let's Talk About Me
Thoughts inspired from someone else's post about me:
1) People tend to think that whatever they don't like is my filler stuff.
I had someone commenting that my reverse-Seasonal Affective Disorder must be kicking in, because I had all of these tossed-off, crappy articles on Surprise Buttsecks so forth. (The exact quote was, "I think he knows he's not keeping people's interest; that's probably why he has defaulted to stoopid sex posts recently.")
Funnily enough, the exact opposite was true. I've been so bored of the old blog over the past few months, but the last three weeks or so it's come alive again. I thought the buttsecks post was hysterical. I looked forward to writing about the loss of the D&D Planes, and then I got even nerdier when I dissected the Hero System mechanics. And though The Rock Band Purity Quiz had scandalously few suggestions, I was way too thrilled to write it. Hell, even my Nader post felt real to me.
There are days I'm like, "Crap, I should write about something. Just to have it up there." But recently, I'm excited to get up there and post about this crazy shit. I have things I want to say! Yet when I do and it's not to their tastes, people - not just this person, but people - go, "Aw, man, look at the filler."
The truly hysterical thing is that some of you may be reading me only for my filler, enduring those tedious Realdoll posts to get to my tossed-off, I-don't-care pieces. That amuses me to no end.
2) Not everything I write is meant for you.
My wife walked in on me, pointed at my latest post on webcomics, and actually said, "tl;dr." I shrugged. I had something to say about webcomics, and I did. It was dense stuff. I can't make everything interesting.
Still, it was a post I loved. Y'all don't have to. But I wanted to say it.
3) I apparently encourage both ass-kissers and Ferrett-haters.
I actually don't care if you tell me you hated a given post. That's honest feedback. I'm down with it. The person who thought my good stuff was filler? I'm more amused by her misconstruement of my motivations than I am by her dislike of my posts.
Y'all can go right ahead and find this post boring. I don't mind! (Just as long as you don't mind when I find it boring when you go, "THAT WAS BORING, FERRETT! AH HAH HAH!" in the comments.)
But some folks seem to think I have an army of people who will agree with me no matter what I say. Others have told me that they don't bother to leave positive comments because I never respond to them, but I almost invariably comment back to the people who disagree, thus quietly encouraging the most disagreeable people to comment the most. And you know, for a guy who has a blog consisting only of people who plant their lips on my buns, I sure do have a lot of heated arguments whenever I raise any controversial topic.
The truth is, nobody's generally reading me unless they agree with me a fair percentage of the time. That doesn't make y'all zombies, but rather echoes the human sentiment that you don't listen to people who are full of crap most of the time. (Even the studied opposition makes a kind of sense.) So I get a lot of positive feedback. But yes, I do try to encourage polite debate when I can, so I tend to have a fair amount of people calling me on my shit.
S'all good. Especially when it's just some filler piece.
tl;dr.
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