One problem I've been slowly contending with as an artist who is attempting to make her living online has been this idea of Friction. In this case, Friction just means anything that gets in the way of a person reading my work or giving me money.
Strangely, these two things are about equally difficult. There are plenty of people who would very much like to give me money, just as there are plenty of people who haven't gotten around to reading my comics but would like to. And the only reason they haven't is because of Friction.
So let's quickly talk about points of friction. Let's say I upload a full comic book for free to itch.io, for anyone to download to any device, and then they can download it at their convenience. Sounds easy, right? Well, no. First, the way they heard about that book was most likely through my tumblr account, which means they first have to click on a link to leave tumblr and go to a different site. That's already a major point of Friction. If someone is browsing through tumblr on the bus on their way to work, or as a means to unwind from a stressful day, they are very unlikely to want to leave tumblr and commit an unknown amount of time to a separate activity. Then that person has to decide they are willing to download the files as presented on itch. If they have an account they have to login. (Although in many cases they will already be logged in.) Finally they will have the pdf, but then they have to open the pdf at which point they will see the document is 186 pages long at which point they might well decide actually this is too much trouble right now and do something else.
And this comes around to why tumblr is actually a pretty good platform for comic artists. If I upload a couple of pages in chunks at a time, people will read them as they scroll by. That's a point of Friction already mitigated. If they liked it, or their curiosity is piqued, there might be enough interest for them to click the link that takes them directly to the beginning of the comic (also on tumblr), and they can then read it from there. Or else they might make a mental note of it for later, and the next time they see a comic chunk might be the time they have a moment to see what my comic is about. All in all pretty painless.
Unfortunately, with money that's less the case. If you think about the first example, it's not hard to see why. First I have to get someone to click on my patreon link. Then they have to make an account. Then they have to add their payment information. All of these are points of Friction that exist. What's worse is the existence of Anticipated Friction, which essentially frontloads all of that work onto the first point. This makes it very very difficult to get someone to click on any external links in the first place.
This isn't like... a call to action or to shame tumblr users for not reblogging posts by the way. That's not something I can control. It's just an interesting problem to try and solve.