They are certainly not more successful than SHA 256. The reason you see so little launch of SHA 256 is that it is totally dominated by Bitcoin, developers of Alt Coins know they do not have much chance against Bitcoin.
The fact that BTC uses SHA is not reason for why there are only a few other alts that use it. That reason is because it is very easy to 51% a new SHA with the number of ASIC's that are out in the wild now. As we know when BTC was coming up, there weren't as many ASIC's around and it was able to survive, but it had it's bumps along the way, for sure!
My question is, what can be done to successfully launch a new SHA-based coin at this point in the ASIC game? Anyone?
There has been very little need to launch more of them because there have always been some that are so low difficulty that anyone can easily mine them, so all the work of making and launching a new one was not needed, if you wanted a "new" one all you had to do was add one to your merge that hardly anyone else was bothering with at the time.
The way the first wave of SHA256 clonecoins such as namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, ixcoin, i0coin, coiledcoin and geistgeld protected themselves from ASIC-attack was merged mining. Why bother to attack a merged mined coin instead of just adding it to your merge? Nonetheless a few attacks were attempted, for example Luke tried to crush coiledcoin in its early days.
Among the recent new batch of clones there have been some SHA256 coins too, but they started out without merged mining, some were total clones of bitcoins maybe with no changes at all really other than name and port and handshake stuff that just makes the coins not get confused as to which coin they actually are.
Bytecoin was a bitcoin clone for example, and maybe the first one of the new batch to seriously consider that maybe all the older SHA256 coins might have had a good idea in going to merged minining. Last I heard bytecoin seemed like it was trying to implement merged mining so that people could mine it alongside bitcoins, namecoins, devcoins, groupcoins, ixcoins, i0coins, coiledcoins and geistgeld.
Currently coiledcoin and geistgeld are still so low difficulty that they might as well be newly launched coins, they are easy for newbies to mine with small rigs heck even with just a single GPU or block-eruptor, and unlike a newly launched coin they aren't being orphaned to death by instamining large mining farms. (Coiledcoin that already happened when it launched years ago, but the attacker who did that might not even have bothered saving the wallets so maybe all the attacker's coins got destroyed even.)
Basically launching a new coin you tend to get jumped, so new coins are not really much good for small miners. Old coins that large miners are ignoring is where the big payoffs are for small miners.
Merged mining seems to help a lot because it seems maybe only raving fanatics attack merged coins instead of simply merging them to add yet more income to their existing array of merged coins, since merged coins are darn close to being freebies you can just pick up on the side while still mining all the coins you already mine.
Old coins that get ignored for months or years are especially good because they are the fairest launches of all, since by the time they get popular everyone and anyone had a fair chance to mine them nice and easy for months or years.
You can sit there with even CPUs in some cases, or just one low end GPU or whatever, mining them day in and day out at pretty much zero cost so that in some months or years when finally the mainstream catches on you will have quite nice stashes of them.
-MarkM-