Maybe if the comments were sorted by # of likes the crap would get hidden a bit more?

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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?)

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.

“There are too many assholes there.”

That’s what you get for putting a leash on me.

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.)