Devious Journal Entry

First of all welcome everyone!  I would just like to make a note to everyone that while I will be making more fan art, it will not be my first priority.  I hope this isn't a disappointment to the majority of you.  Expect to see a new MLP comic every week or two.  The next comic of mine will feature my favorite character: Muscle Pony!  You know the guy who has only shown up in two episodes briefly and has repeated an only one word line like four to seven times. Hint: he's going to learn a second word.

I'm also going to be honest: I love the show, but I'm studying the ability of fan art to draw interest to my original work.  Please don't get offended as I analytically muse over dry statistics.

This journal is essentially a log of that study.

A moderately successful piece of fan art when placed in the right locations can draw a storm of traffic.
In three days Princess Celestia's Day Off netted itself over 32,000 views.  The rest of the gallery likely gained an additional 1,300 views in the process.  Of these 1,300 views it resulted in a net gain of what was likely 20 to 30 favorites and somewhere between 6 to 10 watchers who are interested in my gallery at large.  By this I mean people whose fan art galleries aren't exclusively filled with MLP fan art.  To my surprise however two individuals did add a piece of my original work to their 90% pony art galleries.  

The strangest thing is that for my original work I was gaining one watcher for every hundred views (Not pageviews, just views) and one favorite for every ten before I posted my first fan art piece.  Though the favorite ratio dropped from 1 in 10 to 1in 40 the ratio of views to new watchers seems to be roughly the same between 1 in 100 to 1 in 200 or about 1% to .5% of all views.

In the future I do plan on making fan art for other series I enjoy: Avatar, Gravity Falls and Zim but it isn't exactly on the schedule at the moment.  Also none of these series enjoy the same degree of fanatical popularity of MLP or the active fan base.  Given that the last Zim episode was produced over a decade ago its not like its going to have a very active fanbase.  Then again John Vazquez's cynical sense of humor is far more similar to my own.

Honestly that's the thing about the MLP community, its huge, its new, and the fanbase is diverse, people love the series for drastically different reasons.  The reason why people love the series seems to be far more diverse than the various geekdoms I grew up with, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, etc.  In these geekdoms honestly everyone just wants to  the badass that beats the bad guys up.