Why Some Things Are Hits and Others Aren’t
by Joey Manley
A common kind of blog post in the webcomics world goes along these lines: “My comic is [better than / as good as / exactly as crappy in the same way as] [successful comic title here], so why isn’t it as popular?”
This makes people angry — not necessarily the creators of [successful comic title here], who, if they are truly successful, don’t have time to be reading the jealous blog posts of others, but the chattering classes in the webcomics world, who defend perceived successes with bared teeth and loaded chamber (maybe, just maybe, in the hopes of getting a little link love from the successful comic whose honor they’re defending? — nah, surely not). According to popular wisdom among webcomics insider types, it’s never, ever true that [unsuccessful comic title here] is as good as [successful comic title here], because any good comic will automatically, in the friction-free marketplace of the web, be successful. Period. Right?
Eh. Well. Not so much, really.
Here’s a New York Times article by Duncan J. Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, that speaks directly to the less-popular webcartoonist’s dilemma (albeit without mentioning webcomics). In it, he describes a social experiment he and his team conducted using different groups of students who were asked to rate pop and rock music by unknown bands.
Some groups of students were unable to see the popularity (among other participants in the study) of the songs they were being asked to rate.
Other groups of students were able to see the popularity and rankings that the other students within their own groups had given each song — though each group was in a hermetically sealed “world,” with no information about the rankings in the other groups.
If all things were equal, if popularity was solely a function of the quality and likeability of the songs themselves, then the results in each group would have looked similar — maybe not exactly the same, but very similar.
But they weren’t. Not even close. In all cases where the students could see the rankings of other students, early, arbitrary rankings from one or two listeners snowballed at the end into overwhelming popularity for a lucky few.
A completely different lucky few in each group.
In our artificial market, therefore, social influence played as large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality. It’s a simple result to state, but it has a surprisingly deep consequence. Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictably is inherent to the nature of the market. It cannot be eliminated either by accumulating more information — about people or songs — or by developing fancier prediction algorithms, any more than you can repeatedly roll sixes no matter how carefully you try to throw the die.
I don’t think that this means you should stop trying to succeed. I do think it means that, if you are doing so now, you should stop basing your artistic and creative choices on what you think the “market” wants, and just relax. Try to create comics that are meaningful and worthwhile, for you personally, as an artist. When you have done so, you will know that you have done so. That’s the only kind of success that you can predict or account for. If money and fame come your way as well, that’s great. But that kind of reward is almost entirely arbitrary. So there’s no point in worrying about it.
Via TechMeme
April 15th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
It is true that comics with quality and without name recognition have a BETTER chance on the Web than in print, just because the distribution’s so much easier. Who wants to take the financial risk of printing and distributing an unknown unless it’s sexier than Viggo Mortensen?
But “a better chance” is miles and miles away from “a sure thing.”
April 15th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I’d be careful in applying the lessons of this study to webcomics. As I understand it, the download figures were the only information the participants had on the popularity of the songs. They didn’t get to communicate directly or leave public comments, so there was no way to tell each other anything about the songs or indicate what sort of appeal a song had. I suspect this restriction on knowledge would weaken the effects of “song quality” and strengthen the random factors. With webcomics, I’d say casual readers get less statistical data but more “personal” information: forum chat, reviews, listings at hub sites, glimpses of a comic’s art in banner ads. The study seems simple and artificial in comparison, a window-box compared to a rainforest, and I’d take it with the skepticism it deserves.
April 15th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Good points, Tim, that I hadn’t considered. I don’t think they completely invalidate the application to webcomics, though. I remember a few years ago Xerexes posting some links to articles about blog popularity and “the power law” distribution of traffic, which made a similar case for the tastes of a small number of early adopters causing a snowball effect in the long run. Blog readers have just as much information as webcomics readers to help them make their decisions more informed. But, of course, not of that is in the article we’re discussing. I’ll look for those links that Xerexes posted, and maybe follow up later with a new post.
April 15th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
I’m not sure if this is one of the links that Xerexes pointed to way back when, but Clay Shirky has some things to say that are both consonant with the NY Times article *and* independently generated (years before the NY Times article) based on research on weblog traffic, a rainforest that is, if anything, larger than ours.
April 16th, 2007 at 12:49 am
This is crazy! A popular webcomic comes from the unspoken knowledge that the popular webcomic is indeed just that much better than everyone else’s, donchyuknow?
April 16th, 2007 at 11:56 am
I think this probably has something to do with the fact that with only a few exceptions, all of the really big webcomics are those that have been around for a long time. That’s not to say that all comics that are around long enough get popular or that popular comics are ONLY so because of their longevity, but there are a number very popular comics which are just mediocre and old.
Anyway that’s how I comfort myself when I look at my low traffic stats.
April 16th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
I’ve had my webcomics going for around five years and I still have a very modest amount of viewers.
It probably has most to do with the content. Only certain kinds of people would like what I do. But I liked doing it, so I keep doing it.
April 17th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
I think it’s a combination of luck and hard work in order to achieve the money and success. If you make comics for yourself and tell the stories YOU want to tell, then it’s satisfying for you. If you don’t promote it, advertise it, and get it out there on time (i.e. have a BUSINESS PLAN), then your lack of popularity can only be blamed on yourself.
If you do all these things and still aren’t popular, that’s bad luck.
(Also, some of it is genre and subject matter. I had a comic book come out the same month as two other #1s from the same publisher, both of which sold out (mine didn’t). Content was irrelevant as orders had to be done 3 months in advance. Format was irrelevant as one of the sold-out books was also black and white. It had everything to do with genre (manga) and subject matter (non-superheroes). Another #1 from the same publisher sold half of what mine did, probably because it was all-ages and non-superheroes.)
By luck above, I also mean being in the right place at the right time. Which is mostly luck, but is also knowing the market and plugging holes. Like any business plan.
April 18th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Webcomics are interesting to consider under that model because a) They very often address niche audiences b) Those niches are usually rich in tech-savvy nerds (look no farther than Penny Arcade et al), c) There seems to be a disproportionately low number of “mainstream” strips on the web, and d) Many of the most objectively “good” (best drawn, most sophisticated visual storytelling, most literary, etc.) comics tend to be more esoteric in their subject matter. I also think that when dealing with niche oriented things, you probably need a larger sample than usual to obtain accurate results.
I personally don’t really buy the “right place at the right time” (I know mr. poet was saying a lot more than that) argument for webcomics because they are so easily accessible. If your content is good, people will stick around once they find it. You may have to do some marketing to get people there in the first place, but marketing on the web is easy enough. That’s a simplistic statement at best, but my thoughts are outgrowing the limits of a single comment.
April 19th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
[...] As I commented on this post at the Talk About Comics Blog, I realized that my thoughts were rapidly exceeding the restrictive space provided by the comments, so I wanted to continue the discussion here. The issue revolves around a recent study at Colombia University, which found that participants given different levels of data about the popularity of various songs, generated very different lists of their own favorites. The conclusion thus, was that something with a slight advantage in popularity at a specific point in time would eventually become much more popular than competitors that had once held a similar market share (something they called the “accumulative-advantage theory). The study also concluded that market results could be quite random, regardless of the objective “quality” of the various competing entities. The final paragraph in the article was pretty wishy-washy, and more or less stated the obvious: That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to anticipate the future, any more than we should stop trying to make sense of the past. But it does mean that we should treat both the predictions and the explanations we are served — whether about the next hit single, the next great company or even the next war — with the skepticism they deserve. [...]
April 20th, 2007 at 8:58 am
[...] Over at his ToonBrew blog, Neal Quigley posts a long commentary on my “Why Some Things Are Hits …” post from a few days back. His unequivocal premise: “Webcomic Popularity is Not a Matter of Chance” Unlike Neal, I still believe that the popularity of individual webcomics has a large random element to it (call it “luck”). Despite my general disagreement with his premise, though, I found a lot of room to agree with Quigley on the particulars — he makes some interesting and truthful points along the way. [...]