Q #1

This is one of those touchy questions that finding the correct answer to might very well make that answer no longer true...

But I'll ask it anyway.

Given the traffice in the galleries, given that people have times they like to view and times they ignore the place, and there are times it gets flooded with a lot of junk and times it gets flooded with good work, and other times when there is a little of one or the other...

What is the ideal time and day of the week to post up an image for maximum exposure?

Does it differ if your posting pin-ups, NVITWS, fantasy, outdoor landscapes, toon work, realism attempts, photography, 2D work, series, Vue, Poser, Bryce, etc...?

Does it differ at different sites? Here, daz, 3dcommune, artzone, elsewhere...

Q #2:

And following on that, how else can one 'maximize' their exposure?

When I started here, I though I was doing poor if I got less than a 1000 views, now I find a great view count to be around 300 - even as my feedback in comments gets more positive and, in my opinion, the quality of my work goes up. Frankly, there is just too much -other- clutter now and I feel like I am one person in a crowded plaza shouting out for someone to see me...

Some of my best work has the least exposure, and my worst work the highest, simply as a result of improving over time as the community became larger and I had less chance to 'stand out'.

Today's galleries (on many different websites) have all kinds of tools to let select preferred brown-nosers stand out, and even when I brosw other's works I often find the best people to be the least well known.

So what can those of us on the obscure end do to be seen more?

uh..as someone who's never cracked 400...what's yer complaint ?..;)

Depends on what you're after..you're dealing with 24 different time zones, and when you get hits can depend on things as various as, does it appeal to people in Asia (who are up with the States are in bed...assuming something would appeal to an entire continent..;) vs America, Europe, etc. In other words, when are people up and looking at your stuff, or fast asleep..;)

I would think weekends are a good shot, but that's when more people post. It seems many people tend to check out the pictures in the evening (their local time)

I think this thread came up a while back, and it turned out Tuesday night was best (go figure..;)
but read on for other opinions after this one.

As for what gets the most hits, I suppose you can 'maximize exposure' and then get maximized exposure. there's been plenty 'o threads on that..;)

damned if I know............LOL     Im kinda in the same boat as you! sometimes when I think Ive done a really nice pic, I may get 1 or 2 comments.....other times, maybe 8-10.....sometimes 0...I too feel my work is getting better...I'll look at yours and you can look at mine!...Deal?!?!........LOL
Galleries that is........:)

~Nancy~

The secrets to getting large numbers of views, is easy:

1. Be a long time well known merchant and post work the hell out of your images;
   2  Become part of a  large network of people who view and comment on each others' images (if you notice the images with 1000's of views you will see it's largely the same artists over and over and the comments usually come from the same circle of people);
2. Post nothing but naked women with sized 98ZZZZZZZZZ  boobs.

There are no other secrets :)

Oh the eternal question :) I've given uo trying anythign but doing what I like and sometimes getting confused as to the lack of reaction.  I know that if I do a non nude and get some views and comments I'm a happy bunny :)

John

Arcady, very interesting questions. I say that not just as someone interested in maximizing their exposure (up to a point; I won't change what I create in order to get hits), but also because I'm interested in the psychology of what attracts people, and what people comment on.  Renderosity is certainly a large enough sample to study.

I used to think that posting around 10:00 AM Eastern (my zone), Tues - Thurs was the best, at least for my kind of stuff (pinups, more on that below).  My theory is that there are a lot of people surfing during work hours, sort of a captive audience, trapped at their desk, looking for something to do other than work.  Mon/Fri are not so good, as they might be busier, deadline days. Weekends, people might be out, or creative people might be working on their own stuff rather than browsing and commenting.  These are just theories, but based on tracking my own hits, and by observing the "artists online" number in the gallery as it fluctuates.

When I started here, I though I was doing poor if I got less than a 1000 views, now I find a great view count to be around 300 <<

I've seen something similiar. In the 2 years I have been posting, the hits I get in the first 24 hours (ie, before your pic is completely buried) have decreased, even though my quality has gone up, as have my comments.  I have no way of knowing if the total number of pics posted has increased; perhaps Renderosity has published some kind of tracking figure like this, I don't know. But I must say that at some point I became much less interested in hit counts and almost exclusively concerned with my comments. But, you gotta get hits to get comments….

Now, about posting pinups.  I spend a lot of time on my thumbnails in an attempt to get hits.  Remember, people are clicking on your thumbnail, not your picture. As has been mentioned countless times, if you put T&A in your thumbnail, that can help get hits. Other things I have noticed:

-a nice chest usually beats a nice rear end every time. But I’m an ass man, so I don't render a bunch of boob shots just to get hits/comments. Its all relative; lots of other people do no nudity at all, and get a fraction of the hits that pinup guys like me get. So no complaints here. Just an observation.

-a closeup of a pretty girl's face. Realism helps here, but it could be stylized/postworked.

• a close up of high heels.  Men (and women?) will click.  Lots of them.

-a partial view of something, not necessarily a body part, but perhaps an action or something that makes people impulsively click to see the "other piece of the puzzle."

• put some kind of text on your thumbnail, something that leads the viewer on, a question, a joke, something that makes them instinctively want to know what the context for the words on the thumbnail is. I am convinced this is one of the least-developed aspects of the Art of the Thumbnail.

[As an aside, I really think Renderosity should sponsor a Thumbnail contest. It is such an important part of what we do around here. There is a real art to it. I see some amazingly clever thumbs.]

Funny.... I was reading a similar thread on Renderotica just the other day, and someday said Tuesday was the worst day over there..... go figure. >Does it differ if your posting pin-ups, NVITWS, fantasy, outdoor landscapes, toon work, realism attempts, photography, 2D work, series, Vue, Poser, Bryce, etc...?<

I don't know. It could be that people who are more interested in things besides the dominant style here (Poser Pinups) tend to sort their gallery by their preferred style, and therefore if you post in that style, you get buried much less quickly, thus it matters less when you post. Just a guess. Personally, I always browse All/All, unless I'm in a hurry, then its Poser/Pinups.

Does it differ at different sites? Here, daz, 3dcommune, artzone, elsewhere...><

Since I think those get much less traffic (not sure about Artzone), your pic will get buried much less quickly. I post at Renderotica regularly, and it hardly matters at all when I post (I don't think, I could be wrong).  I don't frequent the other galleries you mentioned enough to know for sure.

Lastly, what Arcady said is certainly true, although I will rephrase in a perhaps more positive way: if you want hits/comments, comment a lot on other people's works. People will quite often return the favor.

I have noticed my 'buried' status is much different at some other sites.

I was looking at my deviantart gallery today ( PLUG: arcady.deviantart.com ), and I noticed I had images in the middle of it that had reached 800 hits. Images that here on renderosity are in the lower hundreds, and which even there for the first half year os so got nearly no hits at all...

Somewhere along the way the right person must have linked to a few of my pics... that or the cross networking there simply works better.

Here, as noted above, after 24 hours I can pretty much kiss any new hits goodbye. Rare is the image that keeps getting seen after the first day, maybe two days if in Vue, three in Bryce (funny that, it used to be Bryce was -the- gallery here, but those were the days when the then admins here banned people for mentioning Vue too often in the forums or even claiming Vue was better, and that's been almost 5 years...).

Thumbnails do seem to be very important. A switch in thumbnail of an image a few hours old has revived its exposure for me on two recent occaisions. One went from very slow to reaching 300 by the 24 hour mark, the other from some 20 odd views to breaking 100.

I've been of the impression that if I really wanted to max out views, I'd do butt-shots in 'short-shorts' from a camera angle slightly below and slightly to one side... But I've only had two pics in my 7 years here that made sense for that... :P

High heels is interesting, never considered an idea like that. I have noticed that the people who get very high hit counts like a style that is best described as 'render a purchased pre-morphed face in a purschased pre-made pose with a purchased pre-made texture map, using a purchased pre-made light set with a purchased pre-made camera angle in Poser or Daz Studio and then postwork the entire backdrop, atmosphere, and light effects'. Those are people that are really more 2D artists than 3D, they're 2D artists drawing over a premade 3D image. That is probably an unfair characterization - it's just sort of a perception I've picked up.

I too figure somewhere in the work-week is best rather than the weekend, but I've never sat down to really analyze it.

Acadia pretty much hit the nail on the head. Here are a few other tips:

• Post a thumbnail highlighting anything that looks like cleavage, the curve of a boob, the crease of a female thigh, or a female butt crack. You can use a horse's ass, but if it even remotely resembles a human female it will work.

• Do pinups and use the same "glowing", gaussian blurred, photoshop actions and the same cookie-cutter scenes and styles and/or poses over and over. As long as the women are scantily clad or naked, you'll get hits. This also applies to fantasy, fairy, and scifi images.

• Form a large mutual admiration society and get them to favorite your images so your images get into the "Art Charts", the latest, still mostly useless version of the mostly useless Hot 20.

• Buy the latest hot scene, figure, clothing, in the Marketplace or from DAZ. Pose her standing or sitting, holding a gun or sword, with dead eyes and a blank expression and say I just bought (fill in the blank)'s sexy new outfit/character and just had to make a render with it.

• Lesbians, or the suggestion of lesbianism...guarenteed to get hits!

-Don't post on the weekend. Practically everybody posts on the weekend. That's probably the quickest way for your image to get buried deep. 

There are more, but those are the most important...lol.

Less views and less comments are a side effect of the site growing so huge. There are tremendous numbers of people posting, making each post go farther back in the line and faster than ever before. There is too much to see and not enough time to comment and still see as much as possible. Without an interesting or "teasing" thumbnail to draw attention to your work, most people have no incentive to look. Above all else, it's still a matter of sex sells. More people are interested in seeing nudity/sexyness than seeing quality work. If that wasn't the case, they wouldn't get the most hits.

Well, I noticed a distinct drop in hits and comments after the site changeover. Before it averaged to about 1000 hits/20 comments per image, now it's down to 400/10.

The quality of my work is improving (very slowly), so I don't think the drop has anything to do with quality.

The theme of my work hasn't changed. Almost all of my uploads are chapters of an illustrated fantasy story - featuring lots of nudity, certainly helps in getting hits!

I think the lower exposure has to do with the site slowness, the unfriendly navigation and the wonky ebots. I do not have the impression that the amount of new posts per day has grown significantly.

 Maximizing exposure? Well, I guess the hints are obvious. A little cynical, true.

Then again, I'm not going to change my themes and style just to get more hits. I just keep doing what I like best. Hits and comments are nice, sure, but they don't really influence what I'm doing (unless a comment contains useful critique, of course).

Renderosity is mostly female pinup art, so if that's not what you do, go somewhere else where viewers tastes more closely match your style of art. Just my 2 cents. bB

maximise hits by posting a link to yer image in as many forums as possible, and ask people to view and rate the image. that was the technique used here (in the distant past) to prove how easy it was to spoof the hot 20 with bogus counts.

tits ass and sail as close to the TOS as you can

Quote - Maximizing exposure? Well, I guess the hints are obvious. A little cynical, true. Then again, I'm not going to change my themes and style just to get more hits. I just keep doing what I like best. Hits and comments are nice, sure, but they don't really influence what I'm doing (unless a comment contains useful critique, of course).

Agreed.
I have my own thing as well, and I won't change my work, but I'll do what other things I can if I can find them. :)

Hits and comments are important to me. They are the only way I can know my 'message' gets out there. Art is communication (in my opinion) and not self-expression. If it were just self-expression I could keep all my ideas inside my head where they are formed perfectly and without the flaws of limited skills and tools. :tongue1:

So when I do art, somewhere in there is something I want to communicate, even if I am not really aware of what it is. I want to get it out there, and I have a need to know when I succeed at that.

To that end I find galleries like artzone to be extremely frustrating with their lack of hit counts. Outside of comments I have no way to ever know if anyone saw what I posted. I get the least comments there, and that makes me feel I am unknown there.

I agree that the new galleries are frustrating. But then I have found a number of the changes frustrating. I was particularly frustrated when they started limiting browing to only images in the past few months. To get anything older you have to view by artist. Not long ago you could browse the renderosity galleries all the way back to image number 1. You still can, but only if you already know who posted it...

It seems to be all about two or three things:

1. timing of the post. :unsure:
2. thumbnails. :woot:
3. building a network of cross favoriting with key people. (brown-nosing) :tt2:

"It seems to be all about two or three things:

1. timing of the post.
2. thumbnails.
3. building a network of cross favoriting with key people. (brown-nosing) "

if you belive that, then you have a long way to go

You think it is about something else?

Your first post seemed to agree, or at least not disagree, with that list. Perhaps with the caveat that the thumbnails have to be T&A?

Do you feel an effective thumbnail is not important. Do you think having a network of people who will cross promote your name (favoriting, key people commenting) is not important, do you feel it doesn't matter when you post your work?

If not that list, a summation of what had been posted by everyone, then what?

Quote - maximise hits by posting a link to yer image in as many forums as possible, and ask people to view and rate the image. that was the technique used here (in the distant past) to prove how easy it was to spoof the hot 20 with bogus counts.

Was that "Help Barney get to the Top 20" action ? I remember that. It proved how Top20 was useless if you didn't have friends to vote on you. And was so funny :)

Someone posted in the community forum that they found that when they let the site make their thumbnail that their views increased considerably.  I tried that but I think it depends on the subject matter of what you are posting.  I thought the first angel I posted in my gallery was my best upload to that point because I actually managed to make  my own light set for it and it came out exactly how I pictured it in my head.  I let the site create the thumbnail and it is the image with the least amount of views and comments in my gallery.

Personally I don't really think there is a real way to increase your views and comments. You can jump through hoops all you want in order to try and increase both, but what it comes down to is developing a "fan following", and unless your name is a prominent one on the site and well known throughout, I don't really think you'll be able to compete with the long term, well known merchants here who seem to be the ones who get the most exposure for their work and thus the larger fan following.

If you are looking for "hits", post nudity in the thumbnail, or mark the image "nudity".  However, nudity doesn't equate to comments.

Personally 1000 hits and 10 comments simply means that 1000 people looked at my image and 10 were moved enough to post.  Now those other 990 might have spent 20 minutes oogling my image and thought I was Piccaso,  or they may have glanced at it for 1 second and tossed their cookies!  LOL

Views mean absolutely nothing when you think about it. 

I haven't posted any images in quite a while, due to some personal problems and lately because I've been learning some new image software. However, back when, I noticed some things that increased both my traffic and my comments.

One was posting in an area that more people post in. I got a lot more views posting images I created with Poser than when I used something else and posted in "Other Apps".

Another was posting thumb-nails that clearly contain only part of the image; a "teaser" if you will, inviting people to take a closer look. Coupled with a creative caption, that can increase the number of people who stop to take a look.

The most important thing I learned to do, though, was to leave comments on other images. As many as possible. When I give another artist some of my time, then leave a thought about it, that artist often seems to become curious about what I've been up to. By offering up my thoughts, I always got some back. :)

My $0.02, adjusted for inflation.

Captain Jack

If ever there was any truth to the whole "breasts equal views" theory...
I haven't uploaded here in over 6 months. No real reason; I just didn't find it necessary. Last week I uploaded a few simple pinup renders; buxom V3s in front of simple white backgrounds. Guess what? I came in #2 on the Art Charts. It's cool and all, but I do admit that I feel guilty. I saw a hell of a lot of renders last week by quite a few artists who are way more talented than me.

other things that help;

Have the main action almost happening on the thumbnail..a little mystery can help

I've also noticed that darkness, dimly lit, or muted colors tend not to get as many hits (which is a shame, dramatic lighting can draw focus to part of the picture you want, or hide a multitude of sins, depending on what end you're working for..;)

Bright colors, well lit, gets more hits..

Deviant Art is just a puzzle for me..I have a real hard time navigating it (it works best if you already know the name of the artist, or go through their 'buddy list'. I'm sure there's good stuff there, but all I come across is cartoons.

The other sites probably get hits based on talent (Daz's, Art Zone, Art Door, etc., great pics, but don't get as many new pics per day as 'rosity..;) And it's the strangest thing, but I keep seeing the same pictures on site after site..;)

Double entendre titles for pics (sometimes just punctuation tends to do the same thing..;)don't hurt, either..

Interesting thread.

Does anyone have any opinions on whether it's better to post into 'Poser', 'Bryce', 'Mixed Media', etc.?

According to the stats on me (plug, plug) my most popular image features a head 'n' boobs shot of Miki and my most commented features a shot of Aiko's ass. Now, because of the humour in these shots, they were meant to be that way, but I sure found that those thumbnails worked well for getting viewers.

Correspondingly, my favourite pictures of my own are not those, but those where I have had lots of different elements working together. I like my 'Dom in the Studio' image, but being a guy, naked, and humourous seems to be the kiss of death for viewers. Ho hum.

FWIW, I try to look at all the latest gallery shots, so thumbnails are very important for catching my eye, and most of my favourite images are, interestingly, photography and other media.

Just my $0.02 and none of the above will stop me doing what I like doing and (within the TOS) posting what I do.

Well i think that you should not go after max views or max comments.. you should go after max effort.

Make the best images you can and let you style speak for them self...

I see images here with such bas posing or cloths that stick true body's panties that flyaround the hips ..and still all i see is "good work" super image" bla bla.. USELESS comments.

I like to see comments that say "nice job but panty does not fit" or "nicejob but Shirt is sticking true her arm".. USEFULL comments.

I myself give some crittical coments here and there.. and many time people say thnx for them because they didnot see the things i mention in my comments...

But doing that kind of crittical comments with the BIG names here and your IM is flooded with "angry" IM's ...

So make your work to the best you can and be happy with real comments .. things like "nice job" etc etc dont count in my book ...

I like to get comments that have something to tell me... critical or non crittical.. as long as its more then 2 words ...

Chris