State of the Guild
Hail and well met, Guildies.
As it’s been evident, Guilded Age has been going under some external changes for some time now, and we’re chugging along at a slow pace but should have things wrapped up soon. A lot of the time you wait until the news is done before you say anything, but sometimes too much time elapses and enough’s enough. What we’ve got to tell you is too exciting to wait any longer, including MORE UPDATES PER WEEK.
So without further ado, here’s the State of the Guild…
1) We are going to begin updating five times a week.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Starting in the new year with Chapter 20, we’ll be updating this comic FIVE TIMES A WEEK. How is this possible? Our friends at Hiveworks are helping us expand our art team to John Waltrip and his twin brother of equal awesome, Jason Waltrip! That’s right, the Wonder Waltrips are activating their powers in the forms of Pencil-Inker and Colorist! That means twice the production speed so nearly twice the updates per week (gotta get our buffer back somehow).
There will be no changes to the story except for new possibilities. We intend on running Guilded Age for another four years, and so there’s going to be a LOT more comics than we originally planned. If all goes well, this will give us the chance to flesh out the universe and the people that live in it, as well as tell more random one-off episodic stories that we want to do just for the fun of it. So, speaking of which…
2) More Bonus Comics
We’ll be putting more bonus comics in Guilded Age Plus, starting with our next one coming from none other than Joe Hunter of Ghost Bucket!
As you see from today’s update, we’re going to be doing a little something special for the holidays this year. An Axemas Special is something I’ve always wanted to do, but could never afford to put in the main comic do to our previously constricted updating pace. BUT NOT ANYMORE. So sit back and strap in for our first foray into a new kind of Guilded Age story!
3) Hiveworks
We have, indeed, joined with Hiveworks. What does this mean, you ask?
It could be the start of something big. They’re going to start taking over aspects of our business-iness so we can focus more on creating the comic and new merch. They’ll be handling our ads, which means their optimization is starting from scratch. As some of you have seen that occasionally means ads with sound. Let me be clear:
We hate them, too.
If you see one, say something. Tell us what the ad was for. E-Mail us at glitchphil@gmail.com. Tweet us at @GuildedAge. Put it in the comments section, we don’t care! The fact is that WE CANNOT DISCONTINUE THE AD UNLESS WE KNOW WHAT IT WAS FOR. So report the ones you see and we’ll have them eliminated. With extreme prejudice.
4) The Kickstarter
Yes, we’re still doing one. There have been way, way more ducks to get in a row than we initially predicted but said ducks are nearly lined up, namely, putting a shit ton of effort into the pitch video to the degree where it might be more entertaining than Volume 2 itself.
We expect to launch the KS in January, and we hope you guys are going to love the legitimately one-of-a-kind rewards we have to offer.
The Volume 2 cover does look phenomenal, though. You’ll get to see it soon.
5) The Site
We have a new site design that’ll be more conducive to our new comic/ad layout, being put together by the Random Assembler, Samantha Kyle! She’s also going to be doing other spots of graphic design for us as we go on, including merch design because, lemme tell ya: I know a lot of designers out there on the Internets and my buddy Sam is the best damn one there is.
Some of you may have wondered why we changed our comic/ad layout. Some of you have immediately drawn the conclusion, “Because it makes more money.”
Well, you’re right. We’ve been freakin’ doing it wrong since we started! Hard lessons learned in the value of above/beneath the fold ad spots. We resisted at first, but the increase in revenue could let us do some crazy stuff for you guys in the future.
So that’s where we stand, y’all. Big plans, big dreams… big delays. It is my sincere hope that when it pays off, we shall all collectively shit bricks.
Because we’re going to need to build a warehouse at some point, too.
Thank you all, as always, for your patience and loyalty as our Guildies. We’re doing everything we can to prove right the ones of you who say, “Best Damn Webcomic Out There.”
Please enjoy the 2012 Axemas Special, Chapter 20 begins in 2013! Don’t miss it!
Holy cow! All of this is just fantastic!
best. axemas, ever
way to go man, soooo looking forward to this, but not if it means a drop in quality. Having met you I imagine that won’t be the case. This is probably my favorite webcomic nowadays, good artwork, great story, a responsive author and consistency. What with the issues of OotS of late, continual updates is a big deal.
Oh good…I was worried that I’d missed the KS while I was lost in the Land of Long Hours And Fat Paychecks.
Wow. I am impressed. Well done, you guys.
Well. Done. Y’all. (and so forth)
The only way you could have made this update ANY better (for me) was by announcing a tour to Europe.
We wanna make it to the UK at least!
badass
I propose that we east coast USA guildies all sign up to take shifts rowing the GA team across the pond.
Yeah, I don’t mean to be nasty or anything, but for me, the first time I hear one of those ads with annoying sound, I will most likely take this comic out of my RSS feed. I won’t support anyone who works with intrusive, obnoxious stuff like that.
I inderstand, I suppose. I’d hope you give us the benefit of the doubt, since we’re trying to eliminate them.
Well, looking at it from my point of view at least, I’d rather not support anyone who ever uses that kind of advertising at all. Reporting one or two annoying ads to be removed is just going to cause those advertisers to make other annoying ads, when I think it’s better to cut the problem off at the trunk. If you do things to annoy me, you’re not going to get my business. Might be a bit hamfisted but it’s the only way I can see to go.
Understandibly, but here’s our point of view:
Our advertisers don’t let us distinguish between Flash Ads With Sound and Flash Ads Without Sound. So we have to let nature take its course, and pull out the weeds when they sprout.
I would say it’s not quite so Hydra-like as you would make it out to be. I sympathize completely with the stance that your entertainment shouldn’t annoy you. So you do what you do, but one hopes you give us the extra chance.
We’re willing to live with that. The bad ads are about .05% of total traffic by yield and most of the time they just misfire into nothing. Though the site serves several hundred thousand ads a week so that leads to a few problems.
All in all negligable to a 3-400% increase in revenues. Now if it was .50-2% that’d be real issue. .05 is standard failure rate on most ad networks outside of adsense.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Captain Hiveworks himself!
Flashblocker is your friend. You should look into it. Turns off all flash until you specifically click on it to make the content play. It’s protected me from many many annoying ads :D
On this note, I sometimes browse this site on my phone. Today when I arrived, a popup loaded, telling me that I was the 10,000th mobile visitor and had won an ipad. Then it took my beowser to a new page, closing this one. No save.
I, for one, can more than live with having a 0.05% chance of seeing an ad with sound. Oh, and ~Long live Guilded Age!~
(For the record, in all my time reading Guilded Age, I have encountered only a couple of really bad/annoying ads, and none with sound. And I’ve been reading for a long while now. Even so, the chance of a sound ad occuring might have something to do with a reader’s location in the world, as ads seem localized to an extent. So lucky me, then.)
Wow, glad you guys are doing so well. 5 updates/week isn’t just frequent, it’s rapid fire. I just hope you’re really ready for this. Any amount of loss in art/story quality would not be worth it imo. GA already had very frequent updates even before this.
This is true, but our friends at Hiveworks insist that the most effective way to grow is to update more. And they’re helping us make that possible, so who are we to turn that down?
Well, more updates -> more hits -> more ad monies so their position is quite understandable. I just hope it’s worth it for you in the long term as it is for them in the short (term).
It probably isn’t a threat to the story, given that they have the whole thing at least somewhat planned out to the end. Art might look briefly different, but I think the Hiveworks team knows what they’re talking about. If they say it can work, it can probably work.
It’s a weird multiplicative thing as well. I only really have anecdata from an unhealthy obsession with stats and access to google analytics, but I find that the more often I update my webcomic, the more views I get per update. (so if I update daily, I get about 100 hits a day. If I update twice a week, I get about 100 hits a week.)
Fun stuff.
Just checking, is John doing the pencil/ink, and Jason colouring? – a change in the pencils/ink will have a much more noticeable impact on style than a change in colourist (despite colouring being an incredibly intensive job!)
(This is not to say that Jason isn’t any good, I have no idea what his mad skills are like (most likely: mad)
We’re mostly letting them work it out amongst themselves, since they know how best they work together as a team. But as far as I know, John is still pencil/ink and Jason is coloring.
Hnnnnng
>
>GIVE
>GIVE ERIC
>GIVE ERIC LAXATIVE
Awesomesauce. Glad to add another daily to my list. :)
Congrats buddy!
THANKS, BRO.
Tons of good news!
(best heard with Frankie S. on the background: “The best is yet to come”!
A note about the ads, fellas…I typically have all ads turned off, selectively turning them on for sites I’m trying to support. I’d turned them off here in the past because this site delivered some bad ones up to me, but in the interests of checking out the new site and trying to be supportive, I briefly whitelisted this site.
As soon as I did and reloaded, no less than twenty-two separate connections to ad servers were made in the space of seconds. One of them ran a script and was attempting to make a cross-site scripting call. Being as how there’s no way to know if those are malware or not, I have been forced to pull the plug on ads here again.
A suggestion for you. Most bad things in ads are triggered via scripts. Ad feeders that feature strictly static graphics and links can’t really hurt you unless you’re dumb enough to click on an obviously bad one. To get my support on ads back, and presumably that of many others, I’d highly encourage you to disallow any ads containing scripting.
it took me a long time to come to this comic. I just couldn’t get into it for some reason. Then I sat down and read the damn thing, and then it was two days later and I was foaming for more.
Now, I am just excited at the prospects. I look forward to the future of Guilded Age.
This is awesome news!!