It is an old trope that there are popufurs that are too good to speak to the common furry folk.
But what if it is inevitable at a certain popularity? The more watchers you have the less time you have to allocate time for every single one. So I did some research and I checked the watcher/comments ratio of a few popular artists here. Here are the results.
Ratio of watchers to average comments per work (the artists' own replies are not counted here!)
0.05% to 0.30%
So if you have 1000 watchers you get 0-3 comments per picture
If you have 10000 watches you get 5 to 30 comments per picture
It depends what you draw of course. If it is a controversial picture you get more comments.
Now lets say our artist wants to reply to every single commenter.
5 secs for a simple "Thank you"
30 secs for a meaningful reply.
So 10 secs per reply on average.
Now how much time does the average artist have to spend every week to converse with his fans?
1000 watchers:
0 to 3 minutes
10000 watchers:
5 to 30 minutes
20000 watchers (I think the maximum here on inkbunny is around 18k)
10 to 60 minutes
60000 watchers (a big artist on furaffinity)
30 mins to 3 hours
So if you have a large fanbase and want to reply to every single comment you lose 0,5-3 hours per week. And that is a low estimate as it may to take longer than a few seconds for a meaningful reply and since my sample size is rather low it might be the wrong number.
Also Journals and any comments on those are not counted.
Yet there is so much more an artist can/has to do to engage with his/her fans.
- Maintain social media (such as writing journals, tweet stuff etc..)
- Discuss commissions
- Do streams
- Post information about conventions
- Advertise your stuff
- etc...
And the art process itself also contains "non-value added" time after it is technically finished, such as uploading art to different galleries, tagging the art and writing a description, reformat for different websites (like censors for pixiv).
You lose tons of time on things that don't earn you any money or make your fans happy.
Eventually if you get big enough you have to start cutting corners.
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5 years, 1 month ago
18 Feb 2019 20:27 CET
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