I once heard something to the effect that when you offer a free webcomic, you’re lucky if 1% of your readership buys something from you. Now, I’m paraphrasing so I might be getting the exact details wrong, but either way, it’s a just a sliver of the whole.

So when I saw all the people that visited my website, I wasn’t expecting any miracles. But still, I couldn’t help but run the numbers: if just half a percent of the visitors bought something, that’d mean hundreds of sales… it was hard not to get just a little excited.

But alas, the 48,342 people that visited my site resulted in an additional 23 e-comics sales compared to the previous day. So about 0.048% of the extra visitors made a purchase.

The buyer is a person. That person does not require either a social network or absolutely-informed guesswork to know who he or she is or what they want to buy. Obviously advertising can help. It always has. But totally personalized advertising is icky and oxymoronic. And, after half a decade or more at the business of making maximally-personalized ads, the main result is what Michael calls “the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of people’s Facebook profiles.

You might find them interesting, and not at all controversial, if you came upon them without knowing about The Americans (in fact, had I seen them without their title, it would have taken me a while to figure out they were taken from the book). For that reason alone, I cannot get worked up about whether they are theft, provocation or an insult, but they do intrigue me as another example of how artists are grappling with the surfeit of images now available to us on the internet. It seems hardly surprising that the brilliant is being appropriated alongside the banal, but, in this case, it seems more an odd form of admiration than disrespect.