Daryl Cagle has been keeping track of the number of email subscriptions each of the editorial cartoonists that are featured on his site have. The cartoonists in order of their ranking are as follows:
1. Daryl Cagle
2. Pat Bagley
3. Eric Allie
4. Monte Wolverton
5. Matt Bors
6. Andy Singer
7. Brian Fairrington
8. Shannon Wheeler
9. Clay Bennett
10. Jen Sorensen
I’m not sure what good it does to list something like this. In fact, I think it’s a bit crude and an invasion of privacy. If I listed all the readers of this blog by how much money we earned this year, would you all be happy?
If he weren’t first, would he have printed this to the world? What if he didn’t make the top ten at all?
Sorry, I think it’s crass.
I’m not sure I see what’s objectionable about listing which cartoonists garner the most downloads from his site. What does such a list have to do with privacy? Alan ran a list of the top responders to this site, which has no particular value other than it was fun (for some of us) to see who has the most free time and the most opinions.
I don’t think it was crass, just interesting. The list has nothing to do with income or privacy. The fact that he has the number one slot is probably due to the fact that his name is on everything on the site. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t sitting at #1.
Say I asked a dozen people to bring dishes to the Thanksgiving dinner that I was cooking, too, and they and hundreds of others came to my house to eat.
You’re right, Alan, since I’m the one in the hostess role, I have the spotlight. So given that, say that after the dinner I made up a ranked list based on how many times people asked for my recipes, compared to the number of times they asked for Sally’s, or Fred’s, and so forth, and I posted it for everybody in the world to see. Since I’m only ranking the top 10 and there were 13 cooks, a few people didn’t even make the list.
That’s not crass???
If not a statement implying my cooking abilities compared to everybody else’s, then what is this “just interesting” interest about? Gossip?? — “Did anybody even ASK for Chiara’s recipe?”…”I doubt it. Her cranberry relish tasted like she scraped it out from under the refrigerator.”…”Did you see that Harold came in dead last!?”…”Poor Harold. And I always imagined him to be one of the best. Guess he’s not as good a cook as I thought.”
A ranking like this does imply income, since the popularity of any cartoonist determines his or her income.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just me. Alan, do you think you could create one of those widget polls to ask the question? Regarding my own online syndicate, I was intending to privately give each cartoonist his or her own ranking amongst an anonymous list.
If cartoonists would rather that their ranking be wide open to public “interest,” then fine. I’d like to know that. I’d like to know what GOOD putting out a list like this does. Does it have value for the people on the list and those that aren’t? Is this how you want my syndicate to treat information?
Is your relative popularity ranking private as I think, or public as Alan thinks? I’m open to being wrong.
What say cartoonists?
As a cartoonist included on the Cagle site, it didn’t cross my mind that showing this list was crass at all. Nor does it now that it’s been mentioned.
There IS good that comes from a list like this. It lets readers perhaps get to know a cartoonist’s work a little better that they typically might have overlooked in the past. One might view the list and think “Hey…there’s some real interest in what this cartoonist is creating. Maybe I should check it out a little more regularly.”
And I’m glad to see Pat Bagley on there. Here in Utah he’s quite popular, but I never felt he garnered the national attention he deserves. It’s good to see that people are taking notice.
Any inference of income/revenue is completely yours. The results are for the popularity of a FREE subscription service provided by Cagle.com which includes a great many cartoonists NOT syndicated through Daryl’s syndication service (did you note that Clay Bennett was on the list?). So how can one conjure up earnings when the cartoonists are employed by their own respective newspapers in different regions of the United States and not on the same payroll?
It’s a simple popularity poll. Think of it as an equivalent to page views for an email list.
I suppose you’re right, Alan. I didn’t know this service was totally uncompensated for all participants. Well, except for Cagle who gets the ad income from the site.
Sorry, my mistake.