Number of followers for 11 top webcomics

Have a some webcomics you enjoy? How you read these comics? Perhaps you visit each webcomic’s website. Or maybe you rely on the voodoo of Facebook to show (or not show) you the comic. Maybe some webcomics have an email newsletter.

One of the best ways to follow a list of webcomics is through an RSS reader. Just today I added eleven of my favorite webcomics to Feedly. Whenever you subscribe to a website through Feedly, it shows you the number of people who currently subscribe to that feed. As I was adding my favorite webcomics, I found it interesting to see the number of subscribers. So I put together a chart that compares the number of Feedly subscribers, Twitter followers, and Facebook likes for each webcomic.

Name                   Feedly  Twitter   Facebook
Incidental Comics.......7,000....8,409....472,882
SMBC...................73,000...97,600....386,961
xkcd..................358,000.......NA....352,195
Channelate..............7,000....4,708....316,423
JL8 Comic...............2,000....1,892.....98,147
Toothpaste for Dinner...6,000...48,800.....47,368
Invisible Bread.........4,000....4,267.....15,111
Chainsawsuit............6,000...26,200......8,316
My Cardboard Life.......1,000....5,497......4,856
Jen Sorensen...............20....5,034......3,406
My Extra Life...........3,000...49,500..... 2,300

For those who like charts, here’s one:

Yeah, some popular webcomics like Oatmeal aren’t on this list. I don’t subscribe to that webcomic, so yeah, sorry.

There’s quite a range between Twitter and Facebook followers for some webcomics. For Facebook, some range in the hundreds of thousands versus the few thousand. But for Feedly subscribers, almost all the comics are between 2,000 to 7,000. I would suspect that the social media numbers range so much for Facebook, because many people will simply click “like” for a comic, but never really read the comic on a regular basis. Facebook doesn’t always show all your Pages in your feed, so people may have forgotten they liked a page. Whereas with Feedly, you see everything. So people are much more like to unsubscribe if they grow tired of a particular comic, thus normalizing the number of subscribers within a normal range.

There are two webcomics that totally break the Feedly ceiling, XKCD and SMBC. The XKCD is no surprise. But SMBC? I never even heard of this comic until last week!

Twitter also has a wide ranging number of followers. That’s probably because some accounts are really dead, and thus don’t get many followers, whereas some other accounts tweet a ton–giving them more air time and potential for people share their tweets. Twitter can truly be a quantity game when it comes to promoting your tweets. Take “My Extra Life.” It ranks dead last for Facebook likes, but it’s #2 for Twitter followers. Scott Johnson’s 76,300 tweets is astronomical. Perhaps people are following his Twitter for him than for his webcomic.

At some point, I’m going to start my webcomic. I hope to draw a fraction of the followers that any of these 11 webcomics have.