Wednesday, May 28, 2008

A Crude Measure of Webcomic Popularity



Jennie Breeden's The Devil's Panties as it usually looks (top) 
and one of the uninked versions she posted while attending a 
wedding. At first I thought it was a guest strip, until I
scrolled back and found a note. Can you imagine how many people
would have declared themselves cartoonists were I to have 
reported the bottom one a top fifteen webcomic?



If you enter nothing in the search criteria for Project Wonderful's "publisher" list, it presents participants in rank order of number of page views so far today.

Because so many of PW's publishers are comics, this means it is easy to compile a list of the top comics using PW on a given day.

On a recent afternoon, the Top 15 list was:

Misfile (a surprise)
Bellen (which seems to have benefitted from some publicity or measuring error, as its average page views leave it way out of top range on other days)
PvP 
Red String (clearly benefitting from an update on sample day)
A Softer World (another surprise)
Penny & Aggie (somewhat surprising)


I did not count non-English comics sites or adult comic sites.

Obviously, whether a comic has updated on the day of a sample like this is going to influence who appears on the list, so additional readings will be of interest. I'll be back with more results.

*Includes Ugly Hill, Melonpool, Real Life, Schlock Mercenary, Shortpacked, and Wapsi Square, updating on one page.