I posted this in Mastodon the other day, but I do believe it deserves a repost here, with slight adjustments.
I personally have a passion for webcomics, I love drawing them and enjoy reading (whenever I have TIME to do so, which has been lacking tbh), but sometimes I feel that no matter how popular some webcomics are it’s still a very niche thing, there’s rarely a case of a particular webcomic becoming mainstream (besides memes, of course).
I know about Webtoons and Tapas, aight? I’m just wondering because even WITH those websites it feels like webcomics in general are this little thing that most people either don’t know or don’t think about.
Am I wrong?
They’re doomed to be niche (unless they go viral like XKCD), but that’s not the fault of them being webcomics. It’s because, like any other web content that isn’t heavily commercialized, you kinda have to go out of your way to find it. Search engines favor sites owned by big companies, either because those companies are sponsors or affiliates for those search engines or because their sites generate a lot of traffic on their own (which looks good to search engines), and someone who just looks up “comics” is going to be bombarded with pages upon pages of DC and Marvel related stuff before they even see a syndicated newspaper comic, let alone a webcomic.