If the site is boring it is because there isn’t enough new stuff, right? Not enough new comics, sure, but what about everything else on the site? What about the rants and the poetry and the stories and reviews and even just posts in our forums? I can do something about not enough new comics, I can take the time to put together new comics for you. Hundreds of them, with only a little whining (and that’s usually in response to someone else whining about me not updating the site enough). I can even take what’s left of my time and creative energies and try to squeeze out some Words or a review every once n a while, but that’s still not enough.
If you want to see the site be interesting and worthwhile, with new content, then you either have to submit the content yourself (even if that just means posting something dumb in the forums) and/or find someone else to submit content to the site. The forums will never be jumpin’ until we have more than a dozen people visitng the site, and our readership will never increase until there’s more compelling, original content on the site, and we can’t get new people to add content to the site if there isn’t already content there to let them know we exist at all (attract them to the site in the first place).
So if the site is boring and you don’t think the comics are funny and you don’t have anything to say in the forums, it’s your own damn fault. Same as anything else in the world you don’t like. If you want something to be different, you have to get up off your lazy arse and do something about it. If you want the site to be more interesting, you have to decide what you find interesting, and add it to the site, either by inventing it and sending it in, or finding someone who will.
Heck. If you can even just send us more cash, we’ll put more stuff on the site. It costs me money just to have the site up, and no one is buying shirts or asking for shirts, or just donating cash to the Amazon Honor System thing, or buying any merchandise through our other online stores, and so we operate at a loss every month. It costs me money to make something that you STILL aren’t satisfied with. There are online comic sites out there that have set goals at $2500/month or $10,000/month just to cover their operating expenses (they get a whole lot more traffic than ME does, and they pay for it), and they have been able to quickly meet those goals through the support of their community. I set a goal to try to just get our traffic up to 50 or 100 people a day, let alone trying to actually meet a small goal of $200 to cover the expense of upgrading our servers to make the site easier to use and more functional, and I got $1.00 from Iain, who already pays for 1/2 of the hosting costs, and $1.00 from my sister. That, and fewer readers than ever.
Maybe we’re not making marketing Modern Evil easy enough. What can I do to make it easier? If you won’t wear a Modern Evil T-Shirt, will you wear a Modern Evil baseball cap? Will you hand out Modern Evil flyers? If I offer you an @modernevil.com email address instead of an @email.modernevil.com would you use it? If I take the pop-up ad off the site, will you donate? What sort of a deal can we make? Some sites are setting monetary goals (see http://www.goats.com) in exchange for rants, forums, extra comics, etc… and I’d be glad to set something like that up. I’ll even take increases in readership as positive change & set goals for that; if you let enough people know about us (and they show up), we’ll go back to 5 or 7 comics a week instead of 3 or 4. If you get the readership to 100 or 500 people a day, we’ll even do new artwork, or return to our old strips that had original artwork every day. What goals can we set that you can meet? If we get 2500 readers in the whole next month and make $200 between shirts and merchandise & donations, we’ll give you a new comic five days a week, plus two movie reviews every week, and some site enhancements that will make it easier for everyone to submit everything without having to use email or leave the site, and even make it easier to let your friends know about the great stuff we have to offer…
Look, I’m just saying, this site can only be as great as you make it, whether by directly contributing content, or by sending in your money so I can afford to make content for you. Don’t expect anything more out of the site than you’re willing to put into it.
(This message appeared originally in our forums, and you can tell me what you think about whether the site is boring or not by clicking here[dead link].)
