Web Content Top Web Comics = pr0n?

[Buba]

I remember a few years ago the Top 100 having a few - like two or three - porn comics.
Skimming the ranking today gives the impression of porn accounting for about a a third of listed titles.
What happened?

Top Web Comics - Your Webcomic List

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

I remember a few years ago the Top 100 having a few - like two or three - porn comics.
Skimming the ranking today gives the impression of porn accounting for about a a third of listed titles.
What happened?

Top Web Comics - Your Webcomic List

"🎶Welcome to the internet
Have a look around
Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found
We've got mountains of content
Some better, some worse
If none of it's of interest to you, you'd be the first

Welcome to the internet
Come and take a seat
Would you like to see the news
Or any famous women's feet

There's no need to panic
This isn't a test [*laughs*]
Just nod or shake your head and we'll do the rest🎶"

on a more serious note as someone who is a member of deviantart and frequently goes to fanfiction.net all I can say is that it's a wonder that wasn't the case to begin with.

 

[Laskar]

Wow. You weren't kidding.

Pornographic webcomics have been around for a long time, and they only got more common after SFM lowered the bar to entry. I guess the only question is why are they so overrepresented in this contest. Maybe the contest rules changed to allow smut, where previously the smut had to be buried in plot and hidden behind a paywall, like Drowtales? Or maybe the community that frequents these comics finally realized that Top Webcomics was a thing, and began to vote in earnest?

Kind of sad to scan the list and see how few are worth following. Even Girl Genius is only coasting along on pure inertia at this point.

 

[PsihoKekec]

And it's not just porn, it's shitty CGI porn. Which tells us that there are plenty of people willing to devour crap as long as there are tits and dicks inside.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Hmm, I haven't been into webcomics in quite a few years. Offhand guesses...

My first and best guess is a different webhost. Webcomics have some oddly specific server issues, because people often come and binge large parts of their archives they need much larger monthly transfer allowances relative to their small amount of actual data*. This basically meant there were some pretty limited options we had for throwing up a webcomic because a lot of free server sites would just puke at seeing what could happen to an established comic, we referred to it as the popularity curse. You started your comic, got a few hundred readers, built your skills, then suddenly got a big break and recognized or recc'd by a big forum like RPG.NET, Something Awful, or Penny Arcade... and your service got smashed like an egg hit by a sledgehammer when twenty thousand new readers came to check it out. It was basically either DrunkDuck, Keenspace, or watch your project crash and burn right when it got popular and you suddenly got an influx of new readers binging your archives. Keenspace allowed Adult material but limited it pretty severely, DrunkDuck did not from what I recall.

It looks like both their successors do today, and now there's an abundance of other options, so it's simply easier to do. I would also suspect Patreon and the ease of getting a few dollars out of people for porn to be a factor.

*This isn't as true anymore as times have changed. A years' worth of webcomic used to be a huge amount of bandwidth, now not so much.