I’m going to step in for a minute, because I’m the resident mad scientist around here!

Theoretically, our web traffic has shot up lately! I’ve been sent to explain this because I am a genius – but I don’t get it either!

Webcomics typically take a nosedive when school lets out for summer, but that’s when our traffic skyrocketed.

This is important, because we’ve only got 25 more pages left. The creator has to plan for what to do next. Although he suspects his engineering degree will prove to be worthless (it’s because he is old), he is going to continue his streak of getting 4.0 semester averages for his senior year, if he can possibly do it. That doesn’t leave much time for making comics, but, if the traffic is real; the comic shouldn’t be thrown away either.

So here’s what’s been happening. We didn’t get much more than 400 unique SSL visitors per month from January to March, and only 327 unique SSL visitors in April. Then May shot up to 1,005, and we’re already at 978 for the middle of June. The upward trend began with the first State of the Comic the creator did as himself.

Am I not popular? Should I shut up and go away?

Another conundrum I see is that the non-SSL traffic, which should be close to zero, is typically more than the SSL traffic. Sometimes multiple times more. In April it was 1,325 uniques for non-SSL traffic – over four times higher than the SSL traffic! That isn’t supposed to happen. But we’ve got a new datapoint since the music files were uploaded, since they are getting non-SSL hits and using bandwidth. Does that mean the non-SSL traffic is real? If it’s real, than we’ve had a total of 2,400 unique visits for the first half of June. Isn’t that a lot of people? How could they even be finding the comic? It’s not advertised anywhere, or being promoted on any forum, or Deviant Art. And yet, Awstats is only catching 40 bots. There aren’t many hacking attempts either. If the content is being scraped for A.I. training, well, there aren’t that many A.I. companies.

It’s so bizarre!

Even if the number of real regular readers is only half of the SSL uniques, that is too many to throw away. But, given the lack of promotion, the creator is considering that 2,400 might be a real number that could be higher, since many readers will let a few pages build up before they check in again. The creator only had a few hundred watchers on Deviant Art, but that was enough to make his version of the Starship Enterprise go viral. So potentially one of these songs could go viral, which would be a life changing event worth more than his engineering degree. The songs aren’t getting many listens, but at least they’re getting some listens. Progress was made. Who would have ever thought this little, unknown web site would have more value than a big “platform?”