2 posts tagged “is it funny today?”

The other day I told you about Is It Funny Today?. a listing and voting service for comics.  They had a note on their site encouraging you to submit your comic, but warning that it might take a while to get to, because they were swamped with rejections.  No problem, right?  I submitted my URL and waited patiently.

A few days later, I received this email:

Hey Kevin,

Due to the huge amount of requests that we've received, we've had to
implement a minimum traffic requirement, unfortunately.

Do you have any analytics or other traffic data that you can show us?

Thanks,
Zack

Okay, weird, right?  The way these listing services work is symbiotically.  You send them traffic, and they send you traffic.  You both benefit.  For comic owners, it's an excellent way to improve traffic by exposing people to your comic who might not have heard of it before.  In fact, it's one of the main methods of doing so.  I responded thusly:

Zack--

It's a shame that you should have to limit participation to comics that have already "made it", so to speak, since the primary motivation for submitting to your service is to drive readership and raise awareness.  I am hoping to get in on the ground floor of this thing so that I can grow my readership, fledgling comic that "Deadwall" is.

Drunk Duck doesn't have much in the way of statistics, but I'm running about 40 page views a day.  Last Wednesday I reached 110 views, and I am steadily climbing.  I'm serious about this, even though I'm using a free comics service, and I'm aware that my views aren't impressive by the standards of your Top 20.  However, am currently ranked #745 out of the nearly 12,000 comics on Drunk Duck, and every day I climb several notches.

Thank you,

Kevin

Now, I knew that my traffic wouldn't be high enough: after all, I'm a brand-new comic, and very few people have heard of me outside of Vox and Drunk Duck.  But I was hoping that the quality and care I put into a very silly comic would show through my meager stats, and that would be taken into consideration.  Nope:

Hey Kevin,

I really am sorry that we had to reject your comic, we've gotten so many requests that we can't accept them all, thus the traffic requirement.  Please, though, if your comic starts to get more traffic in the future, let us know and we'll add it.

Thanks,

Zack

So, you have this site which drives traffic, but they don't want to have anything to do with you unless you ALREADY have hundreds or thousands of readers.  Therefore, there is no reason for anybody to use this website as a promotional tool.  Because you're either going to be arbitrarily turned down for not being popular enough, or you're already so widely-read that you don't really need the help.  What could be an excellent tool for quality but under-read comics is instead merely a wanking site for the top 20 biggest comics on the internet.

It would make sense to me to accept submissions by quality rather than some random idea that your seriousness can only be judged by your traffic data, but what do I know?  I'm just trying to get people to read a comic about dead animals that I work pretty hard on.

I submitted Deadwall to a cool new comic-rating site called Is It Funny Today?  My comic isn't listed there yet because the place is new and they're swamped with new comics, but go check it out.  You might find something new to read.