We recently launched our brand-new mobile apps, yay! (Check out our launch promotions!) This was one of the biggest launches we ever had during the 2 1/2 years' history of Tapastic. Why? Because Tapastic is all about "mobile comics."
Tapastic's mission #1 is to provide the best platform for comic creators to publish content, build fans, and make money. Meanwhile, on the reader side, currently our top mission is to provide the best mobile comics experience. Mobile is fundamentally changing the way people consume content, and Tapastic will become the best platform for readers to find and enjoy awesome comics on mobile. More specifically:
1. Tapastic will actively promote mobile comics
New medium needs new content; publishing old content to new medium never works. Comics should now be screen-optimized, not page-optimized. We believe that showing traditional, print comics on mobile hurts user experience, and it doesn't take many bad experiences to make a user leave and never come back.
We have an internal system set up to identify mobile-friendly comics. On our mobile products, we will heavily boost mobile-friendly comics over traditional comics. This means that, if your content is not mobile-optimized, your awesome comics may get buried and not discovered by mobile users - who, last year, accounted for 60% of Tapastic's traffic.
2. What are mobile comics?
So what are mobile comics? There are many different components that make a comic a mobile comic, and it's often difficult to outline all those individual components; but as they say, "you'll know it when you see it."
The key is to create comics in the first place with mobile use case in mind. Mobile devices have limited screen space, so make sure your readers can go through your story easily, panel by panel, on mobile devices. Some people think Tapastic is all about "vertical format", while really, we're all about mobile format - vertical being one possible way of mobile comics.
Some people also seem to think that mobile comics are just short comics. That's not always true. Though in general mobile content tends to be shorter in length (think Twitter vs. blogs), we don't think only 2-panel comics are mobile comics. Time and again, we see the best comic episodes are the ones tell a complete piece of story, and the optimal length to tell a complete piece of story varies depending on the story.
3. Creators should optimize their content for mobile
We're often surprised to find out many comic creators don't even see their own comics on mobile. This is probably because creators mostly work on PCs to create and publish comics. But it's very important to make sure your comics look good on mobile. We're planning to build "mobile preview" feature on dashboard in the future, so stay tuned for that.