The Donation Drive is Over!
My thanks to the few who did support TheSnakeFarm.com during this most recent donation drive. For those of you who didn't get a chance to help out, we'll still keep that tip jar up throughout the year.

Items will be sent out near the end of the week.

And now for a long analysis about the drive results. Let's peek behind the curtain and look at a long ramble, shall we?

I'm still trying to determine if this donation drive was a success. In the past, I (and I have heard anedoctal evidence from other cartoonists) can count on just over one percent of the readership to contribute in some way to the comic strip. The past few donation drives I've held had over that one percent mark; this one had far fewer than one percent of the average daily readership send in donations. Now I know that there were different reasons why this could be. After all, it was only three months ago I had a rather good showing with the "Help Thomas get to the SDCC" thing (roughly one percent helped out there). Prior drives had some advertising in the weeks before the drive started; this time there wasn't anything but the teaser "got dice?" graphic.

Just taking the results from this drive on their own, it was pretty bad. Far, far fewer people came out to support the site and the strip than they have in the past. But combined with the (relatively) recent SDCC thing, we're looking at a total that was about the same as May '03's donation drive...which isn't good. Of the people who did contribute this go around, all of the names were people that I've seen on the site before the 'con. (Add this finding to noticing that the readership hasn't gone up that much since the convention and you've got a cartoonist re-thinking his convention plans next year.)

Of all the people that did contribute, this time only one person went to the $50 level. Now I know what you're thinking -- you got fifty bucks, you greedy bastard! -- but compare this to prior donation drives and we see that the higher incentive level donations were down from prior drives. In fact, a review of the referral logs for the site show that the number of people who viewed the drive page were down considerably (totals and on a daily basis).

So you see how I'm looking at this drive as a notch in the "unsuccessful" column: fewer contributors and an overall lower amount of contributions. (Result? Thomas gets into a bit of a funk and decides his time is better off watching a Farscape marathon on Sci-Fi Channel than drawing today's comic strip in time for the nightly update.)

So I'm thinking of a few changes for the future. Prior to the donation drive section, I had a storefront through CafePress with all sorts of PE(aott) goods. I found that if a storefront is always open, everyone would wait for next week to buy something -- net result, little to no sales. So with the drive model, I found that with high incentive levels coupled with a limited time frame when the items would be available, we wound up having more people contribute in two weeks than I did in the seven months prior. But now, obviously, this didn't work.

The first step is to get more readers. However, I can't do that on my own. The last time I contacted other cartoonists, I was accused of spamming -- it turns out that you readers can tell other people about my comic strip, but I can't tell others about it. The last time I asked for readers to tell a friend about the comic, one of the sites that did post a link to my strip called my simple request "begging for new readers".

But the truth is with new readers comes feedback, which is what we cartoonists thrive off of. With a hundred new readers comes one new reader that not only can afford to support the comic strip, but will. Of the two motivations, I like the feedback -- the tag board and comments by e-mail are great. My daily trip to the referral log to see the number of readers fluctuate is one of the things I look forward to. When I see that number go up, it feels good. When it goes down, it doesn't feel that bad. But then there's the money aspect. Hey, I know that I give the strip and everything on the site away for free. And despite what you've read so far, I don't focus on the money. Except when it comes clear that noticably fewer readers would like to help support the site, it hits me. Tag board traffic goes down, very few comments in the News Bits, readership levels seem to plateau, and then fewer people join up in the donation drive.

So the key, obviously, is more readers.

How to go about that? The first thing, the most important thing, is to ask the readership to tell their friends. Beyond that, I don't see anything else I can do to help bring those numbers up. With the MWF schedule, I'm stretched pretty thin. I don't have time to go around to the message boards, establishing myself as a player in the webcomics world, hoping that other more popular cartoonists would come to my site and promote them on their sites.

The second thing is to strictly keep to the MWF schedule. Try to get ahead, with a buffer of strips so we won't have to wait until the "morning of" or the "evening of" on MWF to see a new PE(aott).

Then there's the income issue. I'll be quite blunt here. You don't owe me anything. I've set the terms here -- I provide the comic works and you can read them. If you wish, you can show your appreciation for all the comic works here by tag board message, by e-mail, or even by making a monetary contribution. You don't owe me a single thing.

But there are costs involved in providing you with the comic strip. Hosting fees and art supplies amount to just over 71 cents a day. Taking in all the donations I've received since this time last year -- the donation drive and a few random donations (we're not even looking at the SDCC income, as the expenses on that trip outweighed the amount donated and profit on items sold at the SDCC) -- we're looking at a daily income of 30 or 40 cents. Looked at another way, over the past year I spent about a hundred and twenty dollars to give you free entertainment.

So how to overcome this? The donation drives used to cover these costs, but didn't. So there's three options that immediately spring to mind.

1. Put (most of) the archives behind a BitPass-like shield. However the number of people that would pony up a dime to read the strip's archive of over 600 strips compared to the number of potentially new readers this would alienate? Probably not worth it.

2. Banner ads. Highly annoying, but they do bring in revenue. Would the readership drop if banner ads appeared? I doubt this would be a turn-off for new readers.

3. Sell items at a lower price for a longer time. This didn't work out with the CafePress shop; with the low turn out for the donation drive as well as lack of comments saying "I would buy a 'got dice?' shirt if they were priced lower" leads me to believe that this won't work. That said, I might give it a shot with making prints at a lower price.

Wow. That's a lot of ramble. If you have any thoughts you'd like to add, please feel free to comment.

Posted at October 7, 2004 12:52 PM