Hi guys! I just wanted to do a bit of a check-in, as all is pretty quiet around here. As I continue to paint a lot of wildlife art (and fantasy too, I promise I still love painting gryphons, dragons, and the like!), I find myself wondering if anyone depends on seeing my work here on Weasyl? It seems art viewing is scattered to the seven social media winds, so to speak, and I have no idea if I actually have an audience here or not.
It's a struggle for me as well. I've noticed almost zero activity, and zero responses to things as of late, unless I SPECIFICALLY ask for a response, and even then, Deviantart has been doing much better in that arena.
I've also been trailing a thing called 1FantasticWeek on Youtube and Patreon. They are industry artists that do podcasts and give advice for an hour every Tuesday, I believe. They were talking statistics, and how if you add up all of your followers across all the websites, its best to have a minimum of 10,000 followers before you try on Patreon, because only 1-5% of your followers will support you.
I went to fact check, only to arrive here on weasyl to find that there is no way to find out how many people are following
me UNLESS I COUNT BY HAND, EACH PAGE OF MY FOLLOWERS.
There are no statistics here, nothing to NOTE the activity, so I can't gauge its success or failure. What works for me, or what works for my followers, or even a HEAD COUNT.
So, it's rough. I would LIKE weasyl to work.... but it's a baby website. Its got BASIC things that I like, but it's functionality is lacking, and I hate to say it, failing.
I depend more on DA, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for updates at the moment. Instagram being one of my favorites for little tidbits behind the scenes. DA and Tumblr being the best to gauge activity, Twitter coming in a close third place.
Its hard to post as often as is required for today's ADHD audience, especially if most of your WIP updates are for Patreons only. I'm still trying to find that happy medium where I can post often to the public, but MORE often to my Patreons so they feel they are paying for some level of exclusivity.
What do you mean by "no statistics"? There are general account statistics on your profile, including the number of followers (you surely don't need to count them manually), and on each submission there is a view count among statistics.
I feel all of your comment, but Weasyl does have some stats? They are just in a weird place that I often forget to look for. They are on the right sidebar on your main page, you may need to scroll down a bit. For you I see:
15379
Pageviews
921
Followers
87
Favorites Given
7652
Favorites Received
7
Submissions
68
Journals
75
Following
(sorry for the weird copypaste formatting)
Anyhow, it's really hard to get engagement like I used to. Everyone is so scattered... I hear you. Not saying it's good or bad, just different. We used to only have a few major "social media art" sites to go browse to get our art jam going, and so one could depend on at least some level of engagement on those sites because everyone was clustered there. Everything evolves, it's just that the changes have made it harder on all but perhaps the most well known artists. I'm thinking of writing a tumblr post about this very thing.
HUH. I switched to Chrome, and you're right! There it is! Firefox, ye hath failed me!
And yes, I would encourage it, I think that is a good thing. Its been interesting to gauge the responsiveness.... I've been making journals and polls across a few sites to keep people interested and active, but yeah.....
The means these days really do stretch an artist thin across the board. I wish you luck though! I think everyone has been getting some interesting results in these ventures to figure out how the heck to keep their audience!
Weasyl is pretty much the only dedicated art site I watch any more (for a variety of reasons, with little to no desire to go back to previous places like DA and FA). I've never been particularly vocal, just fav what I like and support what I love when I'm financially able. I have been super happy with how active a lot of artists have become on twitter, since I pretty much live over there. I used to be into instagram but once they went to algorithmic timelines rather than chronological it just lost all my interest. WIP posting and series stuff just has to be present in order otherwise its a mess, and I couldn't keep up with artists posting there once the timeline got borked.
tl;dr - Yes weasyl is my only art site, but I love following art twitters as well!
I follow people a lot of places, and it is just in case I miss something on one site over the other, but generally I think FA is my most active site for me personally, Everything else is hit or miss, with Tumblr maybe being my second most active place.
I like Weasyl, and will continue to use it, so I'd say yeah, I like to keep seeing your stuff.
Weasyl is quiet compared to some other places but that's why I like it, honestly- I've noticed that my pieces tend to get a better ratio of comments to overall views/faves here. (forget about deviantart, can't get anyone to even look at a thing, much less say a thing). Your work would surely be missed here if you stopped posting!
Yeah, the general lack of feedback seems to be an issue here, although it might be occurring across the board due to the amount of content you have to compete against. (This is an issue for me across the board. Ever since I brought the Fanservice Era to a close, I just seem to rack up drive-by favorites...)
I stop by, but not daily anymore.
I really WANTED Weasyl to succeed. When it started out it was good. But then FurAffinity updated with folders and ever since then it just seems like the benefits to Weasyl have been rolling downhill. I've tried to make suggestions and participate in the forum, but it seems like the devs are totally content with leaving Weasyl as-is. (whether that's the reality or not, idk, but this is what it seems like to me).
My interest in this site is fading. I primarily use FurAffinity. I really hate deviantArt's layout and haven't used it for almost 10 years. All the other art sites don't seem to cater to watchers/commissioners much or have layouts similar to DA. I like FurAffinity because it lets me upload art I bought. Other art sites are pretty much "only upload art you made."
And Twitter and Tumblr are just... bleh imo.
But, I realize I'm in the minority.
I wished Weasyl would become the FurAffinity that really appreciated human art too. But it seems like it's never going to go that way. So I just mostly stay on FurAffinity in the small niche of people who post human art there. It's better than the other options.
Best of luck to you.
I check Weasyl and FA pretty much every day, or at least 4 or 5 times in a week. I am following 72 critters on Weasyl and 110 critters on FA, with some duplication between sites. FA seems to get a lot more traffic; if I log in to FA and see 10-15 new submissions from artists there, I would expect to see 1 to 3 new submissions when I log in to Weasyl.
This doesn't affect the kind of art you do, but once FA was bought out by IMVU, I quit favoriting anything NSFW on FA. I am still watching the same artists and I look at and download the NSFW art that I like, but I don't favorite it. I don't want my interests populating some company's database. :)
I don't use, or even have accounts on, most other social media sites, at least for looking at artwork. I have a Twitter account that I rarely use - usually I only use it to talk to people that I don't know how to contact some other way.
I am going to be honest here: i share the same sentiments with Bornes who commented earlier about Weasyl here. I primarily come here only for high quality art and/or an organic, engaging social community that can talk and discuss and critique art of various genres, and not just anthros/animals/fantasy art. But my interest here waned significantly given that FA is gaining more traction as it is more frequented there despite the many, many flaws and loopholes/generally dick-ish behaviour exhibited by some of the more outspoken members there. That, being said, I think I would love to see you post more often here as I am not aware of which other outlets you post your content to. My tastes and interests have also changed; I used to only like anthros, but now I try to go into other things like digital paintings, comics, design sketching/anatomy sketches etc. And the only reason why I am watching you here is because of the art; I cannot find art to learn and observe from that matches your calibre (and even if there are many others in this site that have a high calibre, I find their personalities distateful/aloof/snobbish). I have been yearning for the art experience that doesn't have the same problems plaguing DA and FA, but it seems that Weasyl isn't having an easy time convincing others to use here more than other sites. I also find most of the artists that I generally like to be in FA (even if they don't post pr0n 24/7). So that's my thoughts on this.
Thank you! I post to a few other places, and each has its pros and cons (Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, DeviantArt). I used to use FA simply due to the traffic and the overlap my work has with some of the users there (animal/fantasy related art, even if not strictly anthro), but finally called it quits a few years ago for reasons that don't really merit getting into here. I know I lose some of my audience in doing so, which is a bummer, but it is what it is I suppose!!
I'm also honored you think my art is of a high caliber!
Link
FeyPhoenix
I'm here. I'm not a super active constant presence, but I am around and I check submissions when I make time. I'm a bit behind on that right now, but a few artists I follow recently posted backlogs, so I have to catch up again lol