Last Wednesday morning, October 1,
thewebcomiclist.com ranked “The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket
Llama” #356 out of 12122 webcomics tracked, which means that by
midnight at September’s end, Rocket Llama entered THE TOP THREE
PERCENT! Top 3%?? Of what, you ask? Actually, we're in the top 3%
of more than one list, as I'll explain below, but there are several
reasons to feel best about thewebcomiclist.com's ranking, beginning
with the fact that it has the largest sample size both in terms of
comics ranked and readers who do the ranking.
Some sites rank webcomics mainly
in terms of top referrers (incoming), meaning those that send the most
people to the list site. Have you noticed this box on our front page
or one of our archives pages?
If you visit any of these webcomic list sites,
please let them know you're a Rocket Llama reader.
Anyone who clicks the Vote Super100 button will
get a window which shows
the main Vote Super100 Comics webpage and that visit will
count as an incoming click from us. Their list counts incoming
and outgoing visits, but as near as we can tell, the comics’
ranks at that site depend first and foremost on the incoming
count. So everyone who comes from our site to visit theirs
helps our standing with them – for up to a week. They reset
the list every Sunday. So far, our comic ranks well enough
that it usually gets listed on the first page of their list,
on the upper half of the page.
At
thewebcomiclist.com, each comic’s rank is apparently determined
mainly by outgoing clicks. Anyone who clicks our title’s listing over
there and follows it to discover us over here adds to our ranking with
them. They also keep track of how people mark it as one of their
favorites and the average number of stars people give it. Our best
rank there so far has been #350 out of 12152 (top 2.88%). I wish
we'd realized much earlier how prior monthly average would affect
their ranking method. Since we originally listed Rocket Llama with them in
the middle of a month, that half-month's numbers when weighed as a
whole month will forever drag our average down.
Then there’s
Frumph’s WebComic List
which posts separate lists for top 10 incoming, top 10 outgoing, and top 10 with
the most people who marked each comic as one of their favorites. I just noticed
yesterday that we’ve been ranking among their top 10 incoming, which is nice
because people who see that list might click our title and come check us out.
Their site has a lot of information and is growing well. Our overall rank there
(from a score based on multiple factors) at the
moment of this writing is 14 out of 503, which sounds fantastic
(again within the top 3%) except that I'm not sure about how
meaningful that rank is
when non-participating comics don't figure in.
Right now "The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama" is in the top
5 comics rated at
Comic Listing, but a single individual could change that. They rank average
viewer ratings on a 5-point scale. With 4.0, we're tied with several others for
second place. That score, while very nice and very flattering, is based on a
pretty small sample and therefore can sway wildly with the wind. We're also one
of their top 5 referrers.
We enjoy
Comic Match. Their love it/hate it
rating system is not the same kind of ranking we're talking about
above, but their approach is a heap of fun, so it seems right to
mention them anyway. While I'm not sure about the value of voting,
this site doesn't slap readers with a pseudo-meaningful list based
on questionable votes. It just helps correlate (hence match)
your loves and hates.
Not every webcomic list uses click-based ranking. For that matter,
not every list ranks the comics at all, and I don't think they all
ought to. Any ranking method, while fun and interesting, can be
compromised and misrepresents the population's true preferences.
We love what a fairly
new
site called Komix! is doing instead. We're amazed by how well
they organize each comic's information and how much information
they can handle. They have an awesome, awesome comics viewer. They
have some things to tweak and a long way to go toward listing
enough comics, but like our own Rocket Llama Ground Crew, the
folks at Comic Match are really focused on the long run. We're
looking forward to watching them grow.
Whenever I've needed to communicate with people at
these specific sites, I've been impressed by how nice they are. They
all seem to have decent senses of humor, which I should hope would
be the case among people with such strong interest in online
"funnies." Each offers something different, and there really is
room for all of these.
There are other sites we like and a few that we
don't. I'm contemplating comparing our favorite and least favorite
webcomic list sites the way Alex compared
best
and worst
Mega Man weapons, although I do have to wonder: While our site
is still growing, would it really be wise to irk those who'd
promote us? Hmm . . .
