Q.: I’d be interested on your thoughts about Tumblr, specifically the problem Kris has talked about regarding people removing author attribution. Should cartoonists be making their info harder to remove (example, the Something Awful watermark: )?

Furthermore, could Tumblr be a good way to host a webcomic? I’ve been wondering if the de-attribution problem might be alleviated a bit if the user could just share to their “tumblog” right on your site, rather than having to download the image like they do now. A good example of a tumblr hosted comic is Paul Southworth’s “Isaac Splode” (isaacsplode.tumblr.com), although I have no idea how successful it’s been for him.

A.: Kris Straub has written a perceptive piece on the phenomenon of Tumblr swiping that makes for excellent background reading.

The issue is this: Some people are swiping content from Web sites and posting them on their own Tumblr pages — and in some cases they’re removing the copyright notation.

My personal opinion is that it’s annoying and irritating, but I’m not sure it rises to a very high level of urgency. The exception to this would be if the person’s Tumblr page were swiping every one of your comics, every day, in an attempt to masquerade as the creator of the content. In a situation such as that, the Tumblr owner becomes the same as a comic swiper, and I would recommend the same approach — a firm-but-friendly email to the person asking him or her to stop.

Amazingly, I’ve had a 100% success rate with this approach.

Consider this. Perhaps the Tumblr-swiper is removing the copyright notation to try to protect himself from possible repurcussions of posting copyrighted work. In other words, if there’s no copyright on the image, it’s free to post… even if he was the one who removed the copyright.

If this becomes a problem for you, I would strongly recommend a friendly outreach encouraging the sharing — provided the copyright remains intact along with a link to your site. There’s every possibility this perceived foe could become a valuable ally.

Of course, the other possibility is that the Tumblr-swiper doesn’t act as a scraper, but instead posts one, choice selection from your work that goes mega-viral of Tumblr — with no attribution.

If you think that’s a serious threat, I would encourage you to embed the copyright/URL notations into your comic — possibly placing them over part of the image to make them harder to edit out.

Of course, no solution is going to be completely effective. If a Tumblr-swiper is content with erasing a copyright, he’s probably equally content with covering it with a white box.

Finally, according to Tumblr’s own TOS, this sort of issue seems to be covered in two separate sections:

Redundant Content. Tumblr is not intended to be an all-purpose content aggregator. Users who import or aggregate content in a less-than-meaningful way are likely to be suspended.

Copyright. Using copyrighted material does not constitute infringement in all cases. In general, however, users should be careful when using copyrighted content without the permission of those who created it. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”).

Reading that, I would assume that a viable option, is all else fails, would be to approach Tumblr itself for assistance.

Overall, however, my general perception of the matter is that it’s not a widespread-enough infraction for most of us to worry about.

Hosting on Tumblr?

I’m afraid I just don’t see the benefits of hosting one’s Web site externally. It doesn’t seem to easily allow for advertising. And I firmly beleive that you’re better off as a webcartoonist when you’re in full control of every aspect of your site. Hosting externally like this goes completely against my grain.

That being said, Tumblr — like Facebook and Twitter — seems to have some pretty strong promotional juice behind it, and tapping into that be sharing an occassional comic — the right way — could have potential.

But the end result should be to generate and direct traffic to your own site — where you can do things like community-building and advertising-delivery that are so impotant to your core business.

Here’s a quick overview of ContextWeb and its pricing system. As you’ll see by all of the links, this is a topic that we’ve covered in several other posts, but it seems to be a good time to put everything in one place.

CPM

ContextWeb pays on a Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM) basis. The “M” stands for the Roman Numeral 1,000. So, if your ads are selling for $5 CPM, you will get $5 for every 1,000 ads that are served by ContextWeb on your site. That rate is “prorated,” so if you only serve 100 ads during a given time, you will only make fifty cents.

AskPrice

ContextWeb’s AskPrice is the price that you set for serving ads on your site. ContextWeb commits to paying 100% of your AskPrice for all of the ads that they serve to your sitre. But that’s the rub. Set the AskPrice too high and they’ll throttle back on the ads.

Manager

Most of your administration will take place in the Manager area. It’s the second tab from the right, once you sign in, and it looks like this (click on the thumbnail for a larger version).

Using the Manager, you can establish variables (such as AskPrice, Performance Price, default ads, etc.) and you can get feedback on how your ads are performing for a given time frame (which is determined by the Date Range fropdown).

So what’s a good AskPrice?

That’s up to you, and it’s a decision that has more variables than “what’s everybody else doing?”

My own, personal philosophy is that a 100% fill rate is an indication that I’ve set my AskPrice far too low.

I’ll generally try to keep my fill rate between 25% and 35%.

The screengrab that I’ve provided has fill rates of 8% to 13%, but that’s a fairly typical result of January ad sales (as we’ve dicsussed earlier).

My recommandation is to set an AskPrice and watch the fill rate. Let it stand for a couple days to get a good measurement. If you’d like to see the fill rate rise, lower the AskPrice a little. And as you’re tinkering, watch your daily total ad revenue. Like I said earlier, a larger fill rate does you no good if you’re not selling them at a decent CPM. So your daily total revenue is going to be the final arbiter of whether you’re maximizing your sales.

Default ads

So why do I recommend a fill rate of under 100%? Because ContextWeb isn’t the sum total of the ads that I run on my site. It’s the top of a chain of ads.

The process is simple. As a user loads an ad, ContextWeb gets first crack at serving an ad in that position. If ContextWeb declines, the position is thrown to a default ad. If I have multiple default ads for a single ad position, they are served according to a percentage that I determine.

Take my leaderboard for example. By clicking on the Leaderboard link on the far left of the Manager page, I get this:

Those Backup Tags are my default ads.

• Evil Inc Leaderboard / PW (Project Wonderful)
• Tribal Fusion
• Google AdSense
• Scribol

As a result, any ad impression that ContextWeb passes on is then delivered to one of my back-up ads. Twenty-five percent of those back-up ads are handled by Project Wonderful, 25% goes to Tribal Fusion and so on.

I just happen to have all of the percentages set equally. During the holiday season, I had about ten back-up tags set, with some of them set to 1%.

House ads

Don’t forget that you can make your own house ands and place them into the rotation of back-up ads as well. This is as simple as a line of HTML code for a hyperlinked image (hosted on your own server). Here’s my house ad for the 2012 Evil Inc calendar:

<a href=”http://www.evil-inc.com/forums/stains/8843/”><img src=”http://www.evil-inc.com/images/EI_calendar_ad_2012.jpg”></a>

As I’ve stated in the past, I think house ads are an important part of your ad chain. Your ad space has value. You should be availing yourself of some of that value. This could be the case during those times (like the First Quarter) at which your advertisers aren’t willing to pay for the space. Or it could be during times when you have merchandise you want to be sure your readers are aware of.

Performance Price

I’ve recommend you enable Performance Pricing in all of your ContextWeb ads.

Your Performance Price allows ContextWeb to beat your back-up ads with paid advertising.

You should set your Performance Price to be slightly higher than the eCPM (estimated CPM) of the default ads you’re serving (even Project Wonderful).

Otherwise, you’ll be passing over a higher-paying back-up ad in favor of a low-priced Performance Price ad.

Cool tech hint: If your Performace Price is under a dollar, enter it with a zero before the ceimal point. Like this:

$0.50

Otherwise, it won’t take.

Performance Price Optimization

So, how can you set the best Performance Price? Recently ContextWeb added an optimization chart to their Dashboard. Using this, you can look at each of your default ads and see where the optimal Performance Price lies.

In-Text Ads?

ContextWeb offers the option of serving in-text ads. Theses are ads that show up as hyperlinks in the text of your site. For example, if you blog about Star Trek, it might place a hyperlink on the word “tricorder” that takes the reader off-site to a palce where he or she may purchase a tricorder toy.

I have recommend against in-text advertising.

In participating, you’re diluting your own ability to link effectively from your site. See, aside from a double-underline, there’s nothing to alert a reader that this is an advertising link. And you have to know that you’re going to be disappointing a number of your readers — especially the less-Web-savvy ones — who are going to click on a link and be taken to an advertiser’s site against their will. And after they’ve been burned once, they may be very reticent to follow any links from your site — thus eroding your ability to direct readers anywhere on your site.

Blocking

The final piece of advice I’d like to offer is about blocking ads.

Some ads may not be appropriate for your site. And if you followed the posts about Facebinks, you know that sometimes a malicious advertiser can deliver harmful material to your readers through the advertising. One way of patrolling this is to establish a list of know offenders and blocking them from your site.

ContextWeb allows you to do this two ways. First, you can block ads by ad type. So you can automatically block that content from your site. For example, one type of ad I block outright are lead-generation ads. These are ads that are placed for the sole purpose of gathering user data to deliver spam to at a later date.

Secondly, you can block ads by domain. For example, facebinks.com is on my list of domains to block outright.