Newsletters, writing and media
For webcomic artists: which update days and archive pages sell the books and prints.
A webcomic is free to read, and the money comes from the store beside it: printed volumes, prints, stickers, and supporters who pay each month. Tally ties those sales to the visits that led to them, so you can tell whether archive bingers, update-day readers or social posts fill the store.
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01How they sell
- One-offPrinted volumes, art prints, stickers and pins from the site's store, with sales that bunch up around a new volume or a holiday.
- SubscriptionA supporters' membership on the artist's own site, with sketches, process posts or pages a week ahead.
- DonationsA pay-what-you-want tip button under each page for readers who want to give without joining.
02Payments it reads
- StripeStores on the artist's own site take card payments through Stripe Checkout or Payment Links, physical items and supporter tiers alike.
- Lemon SqueezyDigital volumes, wallpapers and PDF artbooks sold as Lemon Squeezy products, linked to the reader's visit through checkout custom data.
What Tally can't read
- Patreon pledges aren't read, since Patreon takes the payment.
- Earnings from Webtoon or Tapas programs aren't read, and readers on those platforms never load your site's script.
- Kickstarter campaigns for a print volume aren't read; only pre-orders taken through your own checkout are.
- Cash sales at conventions aren't read.
03Where buyers come from
- Archive bingersNew readers who find page one and read for hours often buy a volume at the end of a session, which engaged time and the visitor journey make plain.
- InstagramPanels posted to Instagram send readers through its in-app browser; Readable Direct counts them as Instagram rather than Direct.
- Bluesky and TumblrReblogs and reposts of a strip bring readers who arrive with a referrer and can be compared by what they later buy.
- RedditA strip shared in a subreddit sends a short spike; revenue per visitor shows whether it sold anything beyond the spike.
04What Tally answers
Does update day sell more from the store?
Peak hours shows visits, sales or revenue by weekday and hour. Switch it to sales and you can see whether orders follow the update schedule or arrive whenever readers binge.
Peak hoursDo readers who buy read further into the archive?
What they read compares engaged time and scroll depth per page for buyers and everyone else, so you can see whether buyers are the ones who read for hours or the ones who drop in on update day.
What they readWhat did a buyer read before ordering the book?
Open a customer in the visitor list and their journey lists every visit with its source and pages, from the first strip they landed on to the store.
Visitors and journeysWhich social site actually sells prints?
Every breakdown carries revenue beside the visits, so Instagram, Bluesky, Tumblr and Reddit can be ranked by what their readers bought rather than by reach.
Sources with revenueDo readers notice the store link on the comic pages?
Heatmaps show where visitors click and how far they scroll on a page, so you can see whether the store banner under each strip gets clicks or is scrolled past.
Heatmaps
05Numbers worth watching
- Engaged time
- Time with the tab in view and the reader active, which for a comic tells archive binges from quick update-day checks.
- Revenue per visitor
- Revenue over visitors for each source, which keeps a viral repost's crowd in proportion with the readers who come back each week.
- First-visit buyers
- How many buy on their first visit; a low share is expected when the store sells to readers who have followed the story for months.
06An example
Busiest on Mondays, 14:00–17:00
2.1× the visits of an average three hours. Post around Mon 13:00 to be there as they arrive.
Shades are each hour's average over the times this period holds it, so a weekday that comes round five times doesn't outshine one that comes round four. The totals beside and below are the period's actual sums, not averages.
07Setting up
- WordPressMany webcomic sites run on WordPress with a comic plugin; add the tag site-wide so every comic page, the archive and the store carry it.
- Any HTML siteIf the reader uses hash routes to flip pages, add data-hash to the tag so each page change counts as a pageview.
- StripeConnect the Stripe account the store uses with a restricted key; prints and memberships are read alike, with refunds against the original order.
08Questions
My comic is also on Webtoon. Will Tally count those readers?
No. Webtoon pages don't run your script. Tally counts readers on your own site and the store payments that go through your connected provider.
Can I see which page of the archive readers stop at?
The page breakdown counts visits to each comic page, and what they read shows engaged time and scroll per page, so the point where readers drop off shows up as a fall in visits.
Are tips counted as revenue?
Yes, when the tip goes through Stripe or Lemon Squeezy: each one is a payment linked to the visit that led to it, like any other sale.