Papa Llama's Site Report: Who is the Rocket Llama Reader?"
From our site statistics, we know there
are thousands of you who have been checking us out. In the last
few weeks, the number of you who are going through and reading
everything (as opposed to checking one page and wandering away)
has shot way up. That truly thrills us. We just wish we could know who
you are. We've got a rapidly growing audience of people who've been
learning to answer to the question, "Who is Rocket Llama?" What we
want to know for ourselves, though, is "Who is the Rocket Llama READER?"
We'd really love for more of you to
drop us an email or, better yet so everyone can share,
post a note on our forum.
You don't actually have to register to post. Registration is easy,
though, and as long as it's not someone we already know, we'll mail a
free signed copy of the comic book in which that adventurous llama
debuted to the next person to register and post.
One way we get clues
as to who makes up our audience is by checking webcomic list
sites. If you visit those sites, you ought to mark your favorites.
The better sites can correlate your preferences with those of
other people who marked some of the same favorites. That, in turn,
can help you discover new comics which you didn't know about but
which are loved by people with similar interests.
That also helps us too. When we
learn what other comics our readers like, we at least learn that
much about our readers. Plus, we get to check out those other
comics for ourselves.
Before today, the best rank
for "The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama" at
thewebcomiclist.com had been #350 (a nice round number) out of
12,000+ comics, placing it firmly within the top 3%. The rank
fluctuates every day based on how many of their site visitors come
check us out. For the last week, Rocket Llama had been hovering
around 367, but today broke 350 and reached 346.
Our friend and partner Marko's
comic "Robot
Solitude" did really well over there right after he
posted fresh updates, but he bounces around among his various
comics, which means thewebcomiclist.com doesn't track his updates.
Since they don't list it among updated comics, "Robot Solitude"
isn't getting the higher numbers right now.
We've ranked as high as #10 out of 222
comics at the Webcomics Super 100 list, but that rank is determined
primarily by how many people visit them from our site, not the
other way around, so it's mainly an indicator of how popular that
list is among Rocket Llama readers and not really about
how popular we are among theirs.
At the moment as I'm writing this,
we're #10 at Frumph's WebComic List. That rank is based on a
combination of incoming (how many of our readers go to them),
outgoing (their visitors who come to us), and number of people who
mark us as a favorite over there. They also break down the lists
more specifically so we can know how we rank among the incoming,
etc., independently of the other variables. If you like us enough
to mark Rocket Llama as a favorite, you help keep the comic on the
top 10 list which then helps more people discover the llama we
love.
We're tied with several others for
#3 favorite, but I don't think that site has enough visitors yet
for us to know how meaningful that number really is, and it
doesn't tell us anything else about our readers.
Our newest
listing is with
WebcomicZ. Some bugs in the system delayed our getting listed,
but their guy Christopher S. was conscientious about getting that
fixed and really nice to deal with. They appear to be a popular
site (we see their button everywhere) and we're very glad to be
listed with them now. We like their layout and they've got some
fun stuff on their site. Today, our first day listed with them,
we're #540, so we'll see where we go from there. Check them out.
Site stats also tell us some things about you. We're thrilled to know what a
large percentage of you have been bookmarking us or subscribing to the
RSS feed even though we're not listing every individual page on it yet.
When we see what kind of sites referred some of you to us, that tells
us some things about you, as will the kind of Internet searches which
led some here. For example, because we use the term comic strip
in a few places, a bunch of people have visited here when googling the
word strip. However, I suspect that people surfing for just the
word strip may have been hunting for, ahem, something else.
So . . . if you actually cared enough to read through this site
report, then I hope you'll take the additional moment to drop us a
line. Visit our forum and tell us your answer to that question:
"Who is the Rocket Llama reader?"
