Waffle

I'm going to stop counting the numbers for the Webcomicsnation and Modern Tales sections of my content empire for now. Together, they make up a very small percentage of my pageviews and counting them is just too much work as my only source for them is the Project Wonderful listing for the ads that appear on those sites. Project Wonderful only counts the past 30 days so if I'm late tallying up the statistics, they're gone. Bugger that.

Now that Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is on indefinite hiatus (and honestly, it may take a LONG time for it to come back. Preparing for emigration while holding down my job has absolute priority and I simply can't afford to commit to any kind of schedule or deadline), pageviews are predictably going down, except on the . Here are the numbers (compare with last month): ROCR.net: 78022 pageviews, 7939 uniques month-on-month. Down from 82343/8184 last month. Not so bad, all things considered. ROCR@Drunk Duck: 16640, down slightly from 16810. I guess July's result was a bit of a fluke, and indeed there is a lot of day to day variation on Drunk Duck. Number of uniques unknown.

Shout-out: Thank you to George of Amazoness! for linking me in your blog. It's bringing in half a dozen readers a day and is probably part of the reason why the drop in readership hasn't been larger.

Wow, it's been a whole month already since I did the stats thing. Last month's statistics. July's results are as follows:

ROCR.net: 82343 pageviews, 8184 month-on-month unique visitors. down from 98002/8434. ROCR@Drunk Duck: 16810 pageviews, uniques unknown, up from 9951. <a href=http://webcomicsnation.com/reinder/">QOTWQ/ROCR@Moderntales jointly: 5427 pageviews (estimated), monthly uniques unknown, down from 9341.

Apart from the Drunk Duck numbers, these stats are pretty dismal. As I'm not interested right now in increasing my advertising budget, there isn't much that I can do about it other than try to increase the update frequency, which is unlikely to be succesful. I have other priorities at this time, it's as simple as that. One exception: I can start adding more comics to the COTWQ mirror again. I had quietly started mirroring the Corby Tribe storyline, currently being rerun on Drunk Duck in remastered form, there, but had stopped due to time constrained. I do want as many people as possible to see the new version of the storyline, so this week I'll start catching up. But even that is simply republishing and re-mirroring old material. The flow of new material will not speed up for now. Sorry.

Last month, I publicized my usage statistics over my entire network of websites and added some targets for March. The targets were: 12000 unique visitors on ROCR.net (the only one of my websites where I can easily measure my uniques) and a third of a million pageviews (333,333 if you have to be pedantic) for all sites taken together.

Sadly, I missed two updates in March and had to suspend my ad campaigns as I refuse to advertise for a website that isn't updating (though some sleeper ads continue to run as they are very cheap and take more effort to cancel than to leave running). So I didn't make it this month: total pageviews across my network were 260,000. Uniques on ROCR.net came close to the target though at 11513. More specifics: the Drunk Duck rerun mirror had a disappointing performance in March at just 4900 pageviews, whereas the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website and the ROCR archive on Modern Tales performed very well indeed at 42000 pageviews jointly, according to Project Wonderful. In the end, it all sort of evened out. The irony here is that COTWQ/MT archives only had 3 updates in March, whereas the Drunk Duck mirror had 31 updates, all of which were remastered editions of older comics, some of which were a pain in the rear to put up because they included a week-long crossover.

April has started off very poorly indeed due to the lack of updates, but I expect it will pick up again starting Monday when updates resume. Targets, therefore, will be the same ones that I missed in March: 1/3 million pageviews over the entire empire, and 12,000 uniques on ROCR.net. I may have some new things up my sleeve to help those numbers along, too.

Rocr.net had 211051 pageviews in February, coming from 9586 unique visitors measured on a by-month basis. The pageviews are up 70,000 compared to January but the uniques have contracted a bit, by almost 300. The ROCR re-runs on Drunk Duck earned 7110 pageviews, which is about the same as they did in the two previous months.

The Chronicles of the Witch Queen website and the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archive on Modern Tales earned about 23,000 pageviews together, based on statistics from Project Wonderful (making this a very rough guess, but MT/WCN's internal statistics are less useful for month-by-month data).

In all, my little empire earned nearly a quarter of a million pageviews in the past month. Most of the extra pageviews were earned by paid advertising, because while there are plenty of opportunities for free publicity, such as joining topsite lists, contributing to forums, exchanging links or simply asking for a mention and a link, they involve putting in time and effort that I cannot spare at the moment. It's hard enough for me just to write and draw the comic at the moment.

Next month, I will know if the paid advertising was cost-effective. I spent about $ 100 out of pocket, so if I made more from that in February through Webcomics World, I'll be doing good. Beyond that, it's simply nice to have my comics read by many people, so if end up making a modest loss, I won't cut my advertising altogether, though I probably will reduce the budget again.

I am somewhat concerned about the drop in uniques on ROCR.net, though these will be offset by new readers in places where I can't really count them. The uniques are a measure of my longer-term readership and therefore the longer-term health of the comic. So I will try some advertising on new locations, and if I do find the time, to put some work into unpaid publicity like joining a topsite. Targets for next month: 12,000 uniques, 1/3 million pvs.