Rational Comics’ The Great Survey Results

Finally it’s here! I have to apologise for this being late. I was trying to work the data myself and last week I wasn’t going to post this due to the mood after the #Paris and other incidents.

Now then, let’s get straight down to it! For each question, there is a chart of the result, followed by my thoughts on the result. Please note:I use the words, respondents, readers and fans interchangeably in this post.

Questions about you

Starting off with the simplest question. This one was no surprise to me. On the Google Analytics for this site, the data has shown this result before. I’m just wondering why is this is so? I don’t find that our content to be particularly gender biased. Motivational and inspirational topics are for everyone, so are comics. However, business and entrepreneurship topics are gender biased, due to there being twice as many male entrepreneurs than female ones. Maybe that’s why the result is like that. Still, GUYS, please introduce your female friends to our comics to make it more gender even here!

Again, no surprise here. Google Analytics is surprising in how accurate it can be. From it, I already knew that our comics are the most popular with the 18 to 25 age group. Basically, the 18 to 25 age group plus the 26 to 30 age group which represent Generation Y, are also the top two age groups on Rational Comics (RC). Considering that I am a Gen Y person myself, it seems I know what my peers want.

Another interesting fact is that there is nobody above 50 who is a fan of the site.

This question’s result was a shocker for me. I intended the comics here to education and motivation for entrepreneurs, business people and the self-employed. But it turns out that’s only about 47% of the respondents. Most of our readers it seems aren’t in the target category. That said, the majority here is only higher by a slight margin, and generally speaking, most people aren’t entrepreneurs. So, I’m happy with the result as it is. I believe we are reaching out to and serving the entrepreneurs of the world. However, for the 35% who are aspiring entrepreneurs who do not own a business or any sort yet, “What’s stopping you?”. I don’t need to tell you that “Entrepreneurship is about doing, not about dreaming”. That advice is from Guy Kawasaki.

Questions about us

The majority here saw our comics on another site. I have to thank the people who have been giving us mentions and PR for this result. With your help, we can spread our educational and inspiring comics to more people. It also means that as a marketer, I should find even more people and websites who are willing to showcase our comics. Since this is the most effective method, then I should focus on it.

On the other hand, the surprising thing here is that social media shares are comparatively lower here. Either people haven’t been sharing as much or somehow sharing is less effective than website mentions.

This one has an interesting result. I’ve personally heard from readers who told me they binge read all the comics, so that didn’t come as a surprise. However, I’m sure not everyone read everything, and the point of this question was ‘if you didn’t read all, then how much did you read?”. Apparently 6 to 10 seems like a nice number of comics to comfortably read in one sitting. I’ll keep this result in mind to see how much it will change next year when we do this survey again.

It might seem mundane, but this result was quite surprising. I’ve been reading reports on how increasing number of people surf the net on their phones instead now. I know many people who do, and even Google changed their system to give mobile-friendly sites a leg up over the non-mobile-friendly site. From the beginning I made sure RC was mobile-friendly. It was frustrating do to so, but I thought half of the readers would be phone based. Apparently people still seem to prefer their computers for certain sites.

It’s good to see a strong subscription to RC. It seems the people most likely to do the survey are also the people subscribed to RC directly via email. What I don’t understand here is why are people who aren’t subscribed to RC taking the survey? Is it that you visit the site regularly without subscribing? (I do that with certain websites myself.) Or, are did you so happen to visit at the time when the survey was going on? This is very confusing for me, because the percentage of non-subscribers who took the survey are more than the readers who follow our social media pages. I guess for this result, it raises more questions than answers.

This is one of the most useful results. Here we can see what types of comics you like (orange) compared with what comics you want to see more of in the future (blue). The most obvious conclusion is that people want to see more comics about leadership. I shall do this. The next thing noticeable here is that readers want to see less inspirational comics. I find it surprising, but I will go along with your wishes.

Personally, I want to do more entrepreneurship and business comics because that was the original vision for the site. One reason why I do the inspirational comics too, is because they spread better on social media. Generally speaking, our inspirational comics are shared more than our entrepreneur comics, based on data for the past year. Still, the results do show that readers want to see about the same about of entrepreneurship and business comics, so we shall stick to the amount we already produce.

Questions about the future

This is very informative result too. Most of you said you won’t donate to RC if we have a voluntary subscription plan (hosted by Patreon). While I didn’t ask why, I guess I can understand. A minority did say that you would donate, and I greatly appreciate that. I do believe the percentages seen here apply to other websites looking for donations too. Fret not, I won’t stop doing comics whether or not you donate. This is my passion now. I’m just looking for people with that same passion, because your support will be a great help in running this site. Still, I will set up a Patreon page before the year end for those interested, so keep an eye out for that.

I am thinking of creating full, 50 page long, self-help comic books. Note that the topic of these comics don’t have to be about self-help, it can be about entrepreneurship or business. I’m just using ‘self-help’ for the lack of a better word. The example of such a book used in the survey was this one:

Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill – Comic Version from Smarter Comics

I’m surprised and elated at the response of publishing self-help comic books. I didn’t think that many people would be interested in it. I do believe this is the direction to head towards and I will start on the creation of these comic books soon. What I realise I didn’t ask was why are you interested in these comic books? I know the benefits of these comics because I have read a few. But I don’t know what your personal reasons are for wanting such comic books.

As a follow-up question to the previous one, I asked how much to price the comic books. If you noticed, the “not interested” category grew a little once the idea of a ‘price’ was mentioned. Still, no worries, most of you are still interested in the comic book and are willing to give a fair price for it. Like I said, I will look into this and start the comic book creation process.

Open ended responses

There were a few open-ended questions. We don’t have the space to go through all of them, so I will just mention the noteworthy ones.

Question: Which country do you come from?

It seems that we have a very diversified group of readers. Readers come from North America, Europe and Asia. The Google Analytics say that we have a high concentration of USA readers, but this was not reflecting in the results. Sadly we don’t have anyone who comes from South America or Africa. So again, If you have friends from those continents, please show them our comics!

Question: If you heard about us from other websites, what websites are they?

This is varied list. Some websites I heard about, and some I didn’t at all. The latter was pretty useful information.

Question: Name your favourite comic?

No clear winners here. A lot of people like a lot of different comics. Well, we do have 52 comics to choose from, so I’m not surprised.

Question: Do you have any suggestions for us?

In this section, I received some useful feedback as well as some encouraging words. I’ll share some of them:

“If I had a job I would totally donate to you, but I don’t at the moment, sorry! Love your comics though!”

“Keep doing what you are doing. Creating content marketing packages for businesses”

“Just keep it up! Love your Work.”

“Keep doing what you do best”

“Put your url between panels, people have been posting them on 9gag without citing you, and cutting off the sitename at the bottom. I only found you because of one person who filled in the “source” box when posting”

Thank you all for your motivating words! They are greatly appreciated. It’s feedback like this that keeps me going. It means a lot to me that our work is being appreciated.

As for that last comment, I’m working on it too. It’s common problem in the content scene though. I personally have seen a few of these comics (particularly the mountain moving man comic) that are being circulated with the RC logo cut out. I did think of putting a watermark, but I don’t want to tarnish the art that our team has put in effort into making. It’s a dilemma, but if people are willing to pirate and steal our content, it is a sign that our comics are worth stealing.

Closing comments

Looking back at the results, it must be said that this survey is not an exhaustive list. Technically, the results only show the people interested enough to actually complete the survey. I’m sure there are many other people who like to read our comics, but didn’t bother with the survey, or somehow missed the survey.

Some of you might find this survey results post pretty boring. The good news is, I’m taking an online course in how to make great infographics. I’ll see if I can apply what I learnt into displaying these results. If time allows, I might make a second post about these results in an inforgraphic form.

Whatever the results, The Great Survey has been a great lesson in online marketing for me. I’ve learnt a lot about how to run this website, who you (the readers) are, and what should be done moving forward.

Updates on the Patreon and the self-help comic books will come soon.

Thank you all so much for participating in The Great Survey for Rational Comics! I had fun with this, and let’s do it all again next year.