50,000 new visitors to cartoonist's site results in an extra 23 books sold

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Cartoonist Lars Martinson submitted the first installment of the Kameoka Diaries to Reddit. As a result, his website, which gets about 100 visitors a day, had 48,342 visitors in a single day. He thought he might sell a couple hundred more ebooks than usual because of the new influx of visitors. That was a gross overestimate.

I once heard something to the effect that when you offer a free webcomic, you’re lucky if 1% of your readership buys something from you. Now, I’m paraphrasing so I might be getting the exact details wrong, but either way, it’s a just a sliver of the whole.

So when I saw all the people that visited my website, I wasn’t expecting any miracles. But still, I couldn’t help but run the numbers: if just half a percent of the visitors bought something, that’d mean hundreds of sales… it was hard not to get just a little excited.

But alas, the 48,342 people that visited my site resulted in an additional 23 e-comics sales compared to the previous day. So about 0.048% of the extra visitors made a purchase.

Hey, don’t get me wrong; an extra 23 books sold is better than a kick in the seat of the pants. And I’ll admit: out of all the hundreds of sites I personally visit, only very rarely do I buy anything from them. So it totally makes sense, it’s just a bit sobering to see the hard numbers.

3 Things I Learned When My Site’s Traffic Increased 25,000% in One Day

UPDATE: Kameoka Diaries is now the #1 best-selling Graphic Novel in the iTunes Bookstore.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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http://twitter.com/JEGeoff John Ernest Geoffrey

it’s reddit. people there are really focused, will just drop by a site, look at what it’s about, then go on their merry way. reddit traffic nearly doesn’t translate into new readers at all.
- scatterfingers
  
  I’ve found that a lot of link sites are the same way. Especially StumbleUpon. Otimising for SU is almost useless; the visitors aren’t sticky by nature and offer a much smaller engagement percentage than other sources.
nixiebunny

Looks like it’s been fixed. Thanks.
…
Uh, your headline is wrong. The sales did not increase by .048%. The sales equaled .048% of the site hits.

You’d have to find out how many ebooks were sold per day before the traffic spike to find out how much the sales increased. I’m assuming that 23 sales in one day is a dramatic increase for this site.
- firefly the great
  
  Yeah, seems like he had unrealistic expectations. Getting a massive traffic spike like that isn’t going to pay off right away; it’s going to pay off slowly as you see people repost and the thing grows out tree-like. Or maybe they’ll bookmark it and buy later. You can’t always tell exactly why somebody buys something; that’s why marketing is a full-time job for a lot of people.
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  Boy, did I ever screw up that headline! Thanks for pointing that out.
traalfaz

There are a few webcomics that I really like and would like to support, but honestly, I’ve decided that I have too much material stuff in my life, so I’m not buying stuff. If they have a straight up “donate” button I’ll consider using it, but I’ve got too many T shirts as is and I don’t buy paper anymore except in very special circumstances.
http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

Everything about his website says “nothing to buy here, just a blog.”

Artists! If you want to sell more, you have to lower your standards and have much more aggressive salesmanship.

READ THE REST OF THIS COMIC NOW
- ChicagoD
  
  There is a link at the bottom of the blog.
  - AsteriskCGY
    
    That’s a long bottom though.
    - ChicagoD
      
      Neville Longbottom, I believe.
      - http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai
        
        Longbottom is long.
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  Good choice on the orange button Rob, you know your stuff.
- Ultan
  
  And “99 cent E-comics” makes it sound like they’re 99 cents per strip. The first volume is actually 244 panels or 61 pages. That’s much better. And he also needs to get across in the ad the other advantages that you only find out about after you’ve clicked on the ad – higher resolution, exclusive content, etc. The main problem is that it looks like the kind of banner ad that web users have been highly trained to ignore. Make it a paragraph or two of factual content and people will read it and click the link maybe a hundred times as often.
http://profile.yahoo.com/4TS77Q7S2EOHIDY3PZHV4TE54E Paul

From my own reading of webcomics, I suspect it’s very unusual to make a sale on the first visit. You’re just looking for some fraction of that spike to check back in and read your site again. I grow bored of some comics, I keep returning to others, and its the ones I return to that I’m likely to support in some way.
ChicagoD

Now let’s see what the boingboing effect is. He’s going to have another huge spike in traffic. Of course, if his sales are still pretty small it may just be that he has a product that people don’t want to buy. At some point that does become the answer . . .
- marilove
  
  I think a big part of it is as Rob mentioned above: It’s really, really hard to know that he actually HAS stuff on sale. He needs to include more info on that.
  
  The only indication is on the main page, if you scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN.
  
  And if you click on the link to the blog post in this article, there is no indication, at the bottom of the page or otherwise. You have to go to his main blog page, and still scroll all the way down to even know he has anything to buy!In addition to having no real way to indicate he actually has stuff for sale, his site in general is BORING. If I had randomly happened upon it, I would have had *no idea* he was an actual artist. I would have thought he was just some random blogger, and left. Why isn’t there at least a logo or top graphic with some of his work?!
  
  He needs to step up his game.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Brian-Huntington/1389561896 Brian Huntington

I bet BoingBoing readers tend to buy more on average. Hell, 99 cents? I’ll definitely buy these. I think BB once linked to Tonoharu and I almost bought it. I’ll buy anything cool for 99 cents.
- ChicagoD
  
  Send me 99 cents and I’ll email you the title to your very own bridge. Actually, I’ll leave it in the comments section.
  
  That offer is open to every boingboing reader, not just Brian.
http://twitter.com/therantguy therantguy

I think you are leading the reader to a conclusion that isn’t fair…the idea that people were going to go to a new site and immediately buy something is pretty silly…and neglects potential future purchases at cons (I know I spend a long of money at TCAF for webcomic types where I have never ordered anything) or continued readership.

The reality just is that people can’t order from everywhere…
LikesTurtles

Posting on reddit is like buying a billboard. It’s not very focused so you get a ton of impressions but only a small fraction of those eyeball belong to those who are in your target audience (unless you’re arrogant and think everybody is your audience). And as was mentioned upthread, it takes time for someone who is new to a comic (or any content) to become a fan. I read The Oatmeal for at least six months before I bought a book. As funny as The Oatmeal is, there is no way I would have bought anything on my first visit.
http://twitter.com/ferkungamaboobo Doug R. Thomas, Esq.

Why is no one else mentioning that AN ARTIST can’t be bothered to make a custom design for their site? WordPress default theme + tiny little banner ad the bottom of a long strip of images + no eye tracking => poor conversion rates.

I don’t see the story here. Bad landing page design means atrocious conversion rate.
- http://halfbakedmaker.org Robert Baruch
  
  Yeah, but think about what we narrowly avoided: mystery meat navigation!
- marilove
  
  This. So much this. It’s a terrible site with no real indication that he’s actually selling anything.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Why is no one else mentioning that AN ARTIST can’t be bothered to make a custom design for their site?
  
  You found an artist’s site that isn’t a Flash labyrinth and you’re complaining?
  - marilove
    
    There is a happy medium between “100% devoid of any kind of personality whatsoever” and “1998 Geocities.com atrocity”, surely!
  - scatterfingers
    
    Yes, that’s the only other option.
- http://www.candicepayne.com Candice
  
  Artist != web designer.
Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston

I’m sure nobody wants to discuss this – but getting eyeballs on the product is one thing, and having a product that draws people to purchase is another.

I hate to say it – but that first webcomic that I see on your site turns me off almost entirely. It’s just… a really ordinary life, but drawn with bubbly figures. Nothing happens and nothing is hinted at, and it certainly isn’t funny. I mean, the price isn’t a problem. If something amused or interested me I’d probably be happy to pay even 1.99 for it. But you need to have something captivating. Most webcomics and graphic material give you the message that a story is interesting because it is represented pictorially, even with flat writing and uninteresting plot.
hunin

The conversion rate for impressions sounds about right to me. Typically you have 5-10% of new visitors who become regular or interested readers. Then only 1-5% of those regular readers will buy something on any particular day. 5% * 1% = 0.05% which is about what he got in conversion rate.
- http://halfbakedmaker.org Robert Baruch
  
  This. It hinges on what you define as “your readership”. 50,000 new impressions is not 50,000 added on to your readership.
ChickieD

I used to design and administer websites for a few yoga teachers. One was well known, though he had a weird name that was impossible to spell right, so he wasn’t exactly the easiest person to Google. He had a little webstore where he sold mostly homemade cds and videos via paypal. He sold crazy product. I used to see his sales in his paypal account sometimes when I’d log in to add a new button to his store and it was just unbelievable how much money this guy made, despite not having other sites linking to him or any of the technical things that are supposed to make a website popular.

Another teacher desperately wanted to be on his level. She was a tireless self-promoter who had an e-newsletter she published religiously every month for at least 8 years. She had a radio show on some fairly well trafficked outlet. She sold vitamins and audio-files, also in a little homemade webstore, and her sales were crap despite her relentless promotion (and she was a knowledgeable person with an interesting radio show and informative newsletter).

Another guy I knew made a beautiful little homemade DVD, printed 100 of them thinking it’d take months to get them sold, and put a buy now button on his website. He got a review right off the bat in some discussion group of people who exercise at home to videos. He ended up selling out all of his first printing within a day or two of that review hitting and continues to get sales off of that one review on the web with almost no other promotion.

I would say based on what I saw from these people that getting a reputation, getting good reviews, getting other people to buzz about you is much more important that having a website that works the right way or any of the technical details or even being a good self-promoter. What it takes to get that, though…not sure exactly. Yes, being good at what you do, but there seems to be some other element too.
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  Design certainly does have a huge impact on sales, how could it not? Sure, making the header green isn’t likely to have an impact; but thinking carefully about the user journey, the calls to action, the micro-copy (i.e. designing) makes a huge difference. There’s plenty of data out there to back it up, it’s a science.
  
  In your case it just sounds like 4 different merchants with different sales techniques, different products and varying quality traffic. Hardly surprising their sales differed – there are an almost infinite number of factors at play, it’s not quite the mystery you make it out to be.
  - ChickieD
    
    I think the design of the websites had almost no impact on their sales. It was the person’s reputation that made the sales. The guy with the most sales was a best selling author, though his book was published years before. His site was pretty nicely designed (I didn’t design that one), but the tireless self-promoter’s site was equally nice.
    
    Just FYI I have also worked with a company that makes a product used for very large websites and learned about how that kind of site is put together, and I think in that case design tweaks can make a difference. However, for the little guy, I think a pretty website is a waste of time to pursue; instead, go for making your product really good and getting some buzz on it. Somehow.
    - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
      
      Iya never about ‘pretty’, good design isn’t about pretty. It’s about marrying form and function.
      
      Good design will have the same impact irrelevant of the size of te business; bu admittedly a 2% increase in sales can mean very different things to different people. That could represent millions, or it could be an extra £5.
      - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
        
        I wish disqus actually worked properly on an iPhone do I could go back and edit my ramblings. Disqus is the real online failure here.
  - scatterfingers
    
    There’s a science to designing a site that sells product, but there’s a mystery to which products really catch on. Human psyche and all that.
MarkV

1. He’s selling “e-comics,” not books. If he had a physical product, the numbers might be different.

2. He compared only to the sales of the previous day, not the average per-day sales.
Moses Lambert

The reason is simple – it’s a VERY boring comic and isn’t very well drawn. So why spend any money on it?
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  When I was at Maker Faire, a few people came up to me to tell me that they enjoyed reading Boing Boing. I asked all of them if they had ever posted any comments on Boing Boing. They all said they hadn’t and one guy summed up the general sentiment about the comments section: “There are too many assholes there.”
  - Øyvind
    
    For a very long time I was just an eager reader on BB. My desicion to not comment had nothing to do with other commenters being assholes. However, I have always been intimidated by the at times insane level of knowledge that seems to aggregate here. A post on x-planes from the 60s? You can bet someone in the comments once worked on those planes. Assholes are everywhere, and more prevalent in almost any other online forum. BB commenting has quite different challenges.
    Though I feel that now, after having dared to put my toe in, there is no way back.
    - xzzy
      
      The secret is to make hilarious and witty comments about the things you don’t understand, and post at length about the things you do!
      
      Given how enormous the list of topics that BB covers is, the odds of them eventually posting a story about something you’re an expert on are pretty high, so it’s really just a question of patience.
      - scatterfingers
        
        I have been waiting for years for an article on carbide cutting tools, man.
    - http://www.xradiograph.com/ OtherMichael
      
      Yeah, you’re pretty much required to chime in once a day.
      
      You are, of course, allowed to point out that the post 1) is a repeat 2) is old news 3) is not worthy of anybody’s time 4) reminds you of this youtube video, almost.
      
      Once a month, however, you must post a technical comment with at least three online references.
      
      Alternatively, you can post an instragram photo of yourself in a “Demolish Serious Culture” t-shirt reading a Cory Doctorow novel while spanking yourself with the latest copy of MAKE. Then your commenting responsibilities will be relieved for six (6) months.
      - http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza
        
        In truth, of course, that would earn you a post.
  - ChicagoD
    
    I am an asshole, but sheesh, if a moderated forum with a pretty knowledgeable commentariat is too assholish for them, they’re not going to like this internet thing at all.
    - hughstimson
      
      I like the knowledgeable commentariat and I’m indifferent to the moderation, but neither of those things requires assholism.
      
      The assholism exists entirely separately from the positive aspects of BB comments, and it’s a damn shame.
      - ChicagoD
        
        Nothing “requires” assholism, and I would guess that some assholes don’t believe that they are assholes (although the very best *know* that they are). That being said, encountering the occasional mean comment from the occasional asshole is sometimes the price of interacting with people different from you.
        
        I tend to agree with Jeremy below when he says that people too sensitive to this are probably taking it all just a little too seriously.
  - CH
    
    Well… most people lurk, no matter what forum. I’ve seen on even the nicest of forums complaints about how people don’t dare to post because of “flames”. (Perhaps they want to only see hugs and kisses.) Or are you seriously saying that your opinion of the commentors here is “assholes”?
    
    Although the comment above was a bit direct… I have to agree. Well, I didn’t mind the drawing style, but the story would need some serious work to make at least me interested. I read the first page… thought I would give the guy a chance, and got about half way through the second page before giving up. For free… sure… I might check later if it has gotten any better… but to get people to pay for it you need to have something that makes people want to buy it. And on the first page, because most won’t click to the next page if the first one isn’t interesting. Just “Teaching in Japan” isn’t quite enough… there’s a ton of really fun and interesting similar blogs already out there about.
  - http://twitter.com/DaleGlass Dale Glass
    
    This is not being an asshole, it’s just brutal honesty.
    
    I would quite easily buy a comic that was any good. I buy manga on Amazon pretty often.
    
    But for this one I see no reason to buy it. The artwork is simple and uninteresting, so all that could attract me is the content.
    
    From the sample screenshots (which are annoyingly low res and hard to read) I see that “The Kameoka Diaries: Volume One” has trivial stuff like “It’s awfully cold here, and I’m so lazy that I haven’t figured out how to use the AC heater despite my discomfort” and “Japanese food is weird”. Yeah, that’s really hilarious and I never thought of that before.
    
    “Young Men of a Certain Mind” seems to be some sort of boring at least partly autobiographical story. Now it might be a good story for all I know, but nothing in the samples suggests so. All I see is bland introductory stuff, after which I hope something interesting might happen. But unfortunately there are no samples of that. This kind of book needs a preview chapter, to hook the reader.
    
    Want my money? There are two ways:
    
    A. Use uncommonly beautiful artwork. I bought A Bride’s Story because it has artwork like this, even though I wasn’t sure at all it was my kind of manga: http://yakuri.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/otoyomegatari-1016717.jpg
    
    B. Have a good story. I like the Freefall webcomic http://freefall.purrsia.com/ even though the artwork is very simple.
    
    And hell, if you get both of those right, I’ll gladly pay quite a bit more than 0.99.
    - http://mikeoshea.net/ somnambulist
      
      I’m not sure why you think there is a difference between “brutal honesty” and “being an asshole.” They are the same thing. You could be more sensitive with your opinion while communicating the same information but choose not to – then you’re acting like an asshole.
      
      Also, when you type something anonymously on the Internet with a way more aggressive or “brutal” tone then you would IRL, you’re being both a coward and an asshole.
      
      I would put 2-3 out of 10 boing boing comments in this category, and the first person’s “crit” of this guy’s comic is absolutely included.
      - http://twitter.com/DaleGlass Dale Glass
        
        I suppose both things overlap. I think it’s more important to be honest and precise, you probably think it’s more important to be nice, which I’m guessing makes me an asshole in your view. That’s a valid point of view.
        
        I’m not intentionally using a more aggressive tone by the way, I’m just typing what I think as-is. I’d put it in pretty much the same words in person, except somewhat less coherently and with “Hmm”s and “Uhh”s in various places.
        
        I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the first comment. It’s not gratuitously offensive, it’s ontopic, and it’s a perfectly valid opinion.
        
        But I’m curious. How would you rephrase the same information in a less assholish way?
      - http://profiles.google.com/tim.m.holt Tim Holt
        
        So if Mark calls the guy an asshole, is he being brutally honest, or is he being an asshole? Or is there a third category?
  - Peppermint
    
    I dont know. Compared to other blogs and news websites, I’d say the asshole rate is pretty low.
    
    (And usually I comment in spit of, or because of, numerous assholes. Why should the only people ever speaking out be assholes? Not commenting because of assholes is only going to make the asshole rate increase.)
  - Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston
    
    Show me a crowd of people who are too vulnerable to “people being assholes on the internet”, and I’ll show you a crowd of people who take themselves, and consequently every event on the planet earth and beyond, a tiny bit too seriously.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Show me your comment and I’ll show you a definition of Empathy Deficit.
      - Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston
        
        Well well, lookie here. One comment on the internet telling people that maybe a world full of policing your fellow men is just a sad and lonely world full of anger and righteous injustice, and out pops a moderator who instead of brushing off my innocuous comment, fills himself with anger and righteous indignation and tells me that my whole being is lacking empathy.
        
        I’d say that pretty much proves my point. Let the world be, don’t hook yourself into correcting everybody you think is wrong out of a false sense of superiority. I know that’s how you get to be a moderator in the first place, but just allow people to be and the world will be slightly better.
  - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
    
    Be honest now Mark, were they talking about me?
  - marilove
    
    Were they new to the internet or something?
  - spacemunky
    
    Mark, I know you are relating that anecdote to make a point, but I really hope you don’t feel that it’s true. BoingBoing is to date the only site I feel compelled to participate in because the commenters are knowledgeable, witty, and overall very positive. You have a lot of great members leading by example and it helps set and maintain a tone that I hope more sites will follow. I know a lot of that credit goes to the moderators who are constantly sniping trolls and astroturfers and don’t get thanked for that enough.
    
    That said, the only times I feel deterred from participating are when the mods use the position of authority to editorialize on users instead of policing the content of the comments. Seeing people who follow the rules get chastised for dissent or be told they can’t have an opinion on a subject really shatters the pretense of impartiality and shoots that positive tone right in the foot. That’s when I have to count to 10, recite the Wil Wheaton mantra, and step away from the internet.
  - Ultan
    
    “”There are too many assholes there.’”
    
    That hasn’t seemed to hold back any other internet forum in the history of ever. Maybe what you really need is bigger jerks in your commentariat to keep BB competitive with the assholes on other sites.
  - Money Loo
    
    I’m not sure I understand the transition here…
    
    Moses Lambert was simply stating his feelings on the comic, same as anyone else is allowed to here. His just happened to be negative, so you meet his opinion with an opinion from someone else, and imply your own readers/commenters are assholes along the way.
    
    Nice.
    - Mark_Frauenfelder
      
      I guess I was referring to myself in my comment!
  - travtastic
    
    I hate those guys so much. Better not come ’round here, naw.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    “There are too many assholes there.”
    
    That’s what you get for putting a leash on me.
    - http://egypt.urnash.com Egypt Urnash
      
      is this really the place for bdsm games n.n
    - awjt
      
      Shut up, you like leashes.
  - awjt
    
    Oh man, I thought people LIKED me. *shrinks away quietly*
  - penguinchris
    
    Mark, thanks for this comment, it sparked quite an enjoyable comment thread :)
    
    I’m going to assume that the 9 “guests” who clicked “like” on your comment are people like those you met at Maker Faire who don’t comment. But they do read the assholish comments apparently :)
    
    At the BB meetup last year both you and Xeni knew who I was when I said what my username is. You then made a comment about how you like to meet regular readers and commenters – but no one else piped up saying they were a commenter when it was their turn. So my question is, how often have you actually met BB readers at events (or wherever) who you recognize from the comment section?
    
    I write stupid shit in my comments all the time, and sometimes people call me out on it in a mean-spirited way. Rather than starting arguments I just ignore them. Perhaps when you meet BB readers who don’t comment in the future you can explain that it’s an option to ignore the assholes – I’m guessing that these people who are scared away would have a lot of great stuff to add to the conversation here :)
  - scatterfingers
    
    Heh, welcome to the internet.
    
    Maybe if the comments were sorted by # of likes the crap would get hidden a bit more?
Øyvind

I went to his site. I read the comic. I felt no urge to pay to read more. I didn’t think it was very good or original, bland at best. Maybe that has something to do with it? I hope that doesn’t put me in the asshole category. (I’m really not one, promise)
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  I think it would be odd to not account for the desirability of the product, not to judge of course, but you can’t flog a dead horse, as they say.
  
  Let’s get an update with length of visit and bouncerate, two metrics far more pertinent to the discussion than hit rate.
- penguinchris
  
  It’s not really my cup of green tea either but this kind of material is quite popular among people who are really interested in Japan and its culture. The people who watch fansubbed anime and read manga and study Japanese in college (even if they major in something else) and would really like the chance to teach English in Japan too. Blogs, stories, and comics are kind of a cottage industry catering to these people.
  
  And it has some wider appeal as well; there are lots of people who are just interested in “fish out of water” stories, or even just for the travelogue aspect.
  
  I think it’s relevant and not assholish to discuss this fact – this comic has a naturally limited appeal and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think he wants to do it this way as sort of a memoir/journal type thing, being true to himself and his experiences, and nothing of wider interest happened.
  
  He could exaggerate or completely make stuff up, but that wouldn’t be staying true to himself. But he has to accept that this limits his appeal.
Shane Johnston

Seems like he needs to optimize a bit. If the conversion goal is purchases, he should be all in for that goal.

Conversion rates for similar click counts should vary between 1-6% (an average campaign). his .04% is certainly low…
DewiMorgan

Day 1 sales increases are almost zero, but give them time to read the archives: sales will pick up :)
ThatHollie

It appears that I would have to install iTunes to make a purchase. I am unable to locate any statistics as far as what percentage of Windows users have iTunes installed, but that seems like an unfortunate barrier.
- zarray
  
  Most people do, but don’t open it because “iTunes has another update”
SomeGuyNamedMark

This sounds like what you can expect from most advertising.
http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

It’s quite important to note that there’s a LOT more to selling things online than simply drawing traffic.

Conversion is a tricky business, it’s a big part of my day job as a UXer – to assume that a spike in traffic will result in a consistent increase of sales, irrelevant of the website, is lunacy.
Peppermint

Because of course when I discover a webcomic I buy stuff from it on the very day I started reading it.
Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston

May 25, 2011:

Cartoonist Lars Martinson submitted the first installment of the “Large Panel, awesomely drawn Space Action Diaries of Sharon X, burlesque-private-detective-cyborg” to Reddit.
Boingboing headline:”1500 000 new visitors gets author 800 000 new purchases.”
HeartlessMachine

I had a similar situation. One of my projects was featured here on BoingBoing a couple years ago, which led to a HUGE spike in traffic to my website. That was pretty much the start of my sales. (Thanks, BoingBoing!)

A few months later, the same project was featured in a major magazine, with a distribution of maybe 3 million. Someone told me that 1% of people that see something in a magazine are going to act on it. So I expected 50% of that 3 million wouldn’t even see it, 1% of that 1.5 million would visit my website. 1% of those visitors might buy something. That should get me about 150 sales, right?

It turned out I had a few (not many, just a few) more sales the first week or two, but people were calling and emailing me for the next six months, and referring to the magazine article. All in all, I think the magazine article wasn’t good for 150 sales, but probably about 40-50. That’s a tiny percentage (0.0000165% ?) of sales to total magazine readership. And it took six months to fully manifest.
Uthor

A) I don’t see how this guy has a webcomic. I am failing to see any comics to read on his site. I think I’m in the minority here because I clicked a bunch of links to find some. Most visitors would leave after not seeing a comic on the home page.

(Edit, I found something called Kameoka Diaries #7, but the links to 1-5 are all broken, so there’s that…)

B) He didn’t get 50,000 new readers. He got 50,000 new veiws. If 200 of those stick around and become readers, then his 1% figure is about spot on. He says he got about 60 new Twitter and Facebook followers, so getting 23 of those to buy a book is pretty good.
travtastic

I’m not personally buying them either way, but why the hell should I have to go to the iBookstore to buy something? It’s a barrier to entry.
http://egypt.urnash.com Egypt Urnash

Yeah, this is pretty normal.

The past month I’ve been having a Kickstarter going for the first collection of my SF comic. I decided to run some ads on some of the top webcomics that use Project Wonderful – we’re talking stuff like Hark! A Vagrant, Dr. McNinja, even MSPaint Adventures. I spent a couple hundred bucks.

I certainly got more views for those days. My site stats tell me that about, ooh, maybe about 200 people per day read through the entire archive. (The smaller hump around the beginning of May was some space on “Girl Genius”.)

Despite having a prominent link to the Kickstarter campaign right beneath every single page, I got all of twenty pledges. And a quarter of those were actually right after I remembered Warren Ellis had posted a drawing of mine a while back, so I tweeted about my Kickstarter at him and he retweeted it.

Again: crazy numbers of views, about 800 people reading the whole damn thing so far… twenty people deciding to pledge $25 for a book.

The interesting part is as much the fact that the bars on the right side of that huge spike are actually more than a single pixel high; more people are reading it than used to be – ~1200 pageviews a day now, versus ~100 a day. I’m seeing incoming links from a wider variety of places; people are mentioning it on forums.

I seem to remember the Penny Arcade guys once saying you can expect about half of one percent of your readers to buy stuff.

This guy’s experience?

How many people looked at that column of static panels and closed the tab before they even got to the bottom, where the “buy stuff” link is? It’s a long damn way down. If I was reading it as something to read rather than looking into why his conversion rate was so low, I wouldn’t have gotten that far myself.

How many people went from that page to another one, how many dug around further? And how many of them are gonna keep coming back?

How many new fans did he get, paying or not? How many of them are fans who will tell people about his work? That, he’ll find out later.

(Assuming he installs some better analytics that let him dig a little deeper than raw pages served; I use a combination of WordPress’ “Jetpack” plugin and Google Analytics, myself.)
Repurposed

Poor guy. The extra traffic from Boingboing will probably get his blog shut down now…
RobDobbs

I bought mine!
http://vinnietesla.com/ Vinnie Tesla

Since discussion of the particular comic in question seems to be divisive (and since I haven’t looked at it yet), lets try focusing on the general case:

The general case is that there is no general case.

Browsers don’t buy stuff by some sort of random Brownian motion (mostly). They buy stuff that they think they are likely to enjoy a lot. Now, for small- or self-published material, discovery is the first and highest hurdle–simply getting enough people to notice your work enough that they ask themselves the question, “would i enjoy it?”

But clearing that hurdle is no guarantee that any particular percentage is going to answer that question in the affirmative. Of course some works will be more popular (and more commercially successful) than others, even if you show them to the same number of people.
Mark_Frauenfelder

Kameoka Diaries is now the #1 best-selling Graphic Novel in the iTunes Bookstore.
- penguinchris
  
  I think the lesson from that is really only that BoingBoing is a better place for your stuff to be featured than Reddit.
http://www.facebook.com/collin.burton Collin Burton

I’m not sure where I heard about his graphic novels being available through iTunes (I’m thinking it was from an earlier bb post), but I bought both of them as soon as I found out. I didn’t go to his site through Reddit though. In fact, I didn’t go to his site at all until I saw this post.
TimmoWarner

For a buck, I’ll buy that.

I found that I was interested in reading more by the time I got to the bottom of the linked page. (And having been made accutely aware that they’re on sale from reading this post and all the comments, why not take a plunge?)
Palomino

I just checked out the site, it seems there’s only one link for iPhone and iPad owners. So maybe the population that followed the link from Reddit are NOT Apple product owners? Did I miss other ways to purchase his comic?
elliott mariess

this is a difficult one, when you go to a free web comics site you don’t go there with the frame of mind that you’re going to buy anything. when you visit a shop like amazon or iTunes you go there prepared mentally to purchase something and therefore are prepared to part with your cash. web hits don’t result in sails it’s the frame of mind the person has when visiting the site and that’s a large part of the marketing you do that convinces people to part with their money and that your product is worth more than a 20 second scroll though your website. after running a fairly popular blog myself and offering merch on it to help support the site these figures don’t seem odd to me at all. people come to certain site to spend money and other sites to look at the content.