A theory on Line Webtoon

[lunchtiiime12]

Hello everyone,

So this week I had a "fortuitous" week on Line Webtoon. I was absently looking at my comic when I noticed that I was gaining a lot of subscribers, something around 30 per hour. I had no idea why this was happening. So I looked around google, nothing, no new review or anything like that. Then I finally noticed on my phone, my comic was in one of their small featured areas. Cool.

For the next 5 days, I gained a lot of attention. 1000 subscribers a day. I hit the top 30 in comedy. comments came pouring in on each page (but mostly the last page.)

This is where things got weird.

I started to notice some patterns. When I got to 6K - the "valve" promptly shut off. I went from literally 1000 subs a day to 0, or nearly 0. Each page has almost exactly 350 "likes". The views stopped abruptly at 100,000 for the month.

That's when it dawned on me that Line Webtoon is an algorithm, at least, this is what I believe. Their computer tagged my comic probably for having a good start, and put it on the front page. They "granted" me 6000 subs,100,000 views, and 350-ish likes per page. I'd say around 95% of it is not real people. 5,000 new people found my comic in a week, but only about 100 could make a comment? I think their computers said "this comic is pretty good, let's tease him, pump it to 6K and 100K views." I do think some of it is organic. Comments are real, and the rating is real. I also believe this is why LWT has no forum. People would wonder why the participation there is minimal compared to the supposed "audience".

I think this is how Line Webtoon controls the money going out. I don't think their audience is nearly as big as they say it is, all of these big numbers are designed to get Webtoon artists excited, but not actually pay them.

I'm not going to complain, however. I picked up four new patrons (of 5,000 new subs... ok) and made some new contacts via the messaging. I think some of it was real. Maybe 5%.

I intend to not stop producing next month. It will be curious to see if the page views return right back to around 20K for the month, all of these magical new subs and views disappearing in the wind.

Anyway. Just an observation.

[fleohr]

Interesting, thanks for sharing this!

I always wondered why those comics that has like 200k+ subs gets only 15k likes and only 700~3k leave a comment. It's funny how the more I know about Line Webtoon the more makes me feel cheated

[lunchtiiime12]

Agreed. However, this "boost" did lead me to qualifying for a $100 payment, so that's cool. But I know next month it will be gone again. I know here on Tapastic, everyone is real.

[fleohr]

If I knew earlier, I'd have taken the opportunity Tapas staff gave me to make my comic premium, but because I was starting a long serie for the first time, I thought LW would notice me and boost my comic. And here I'm 3 months of frequent updates later and no sign of them noticing me. Then I heard they pick mostly romance comics than other genres (my comic is crime/mystery)

But I'm glad to know the truth now, and I don't expect nothing from them, since I can still build a fanbase there for free

[ghostmaya]

That's why cross promotion is sometimes the answer. But Try to advertise as well on project wonderful or social media. It boost my stats not that big but AT LEAST.

[fleohr]

project wonderful

hmmm interesting, didn't know about this site before, thanks

[beta1042]

you got a boost in subs cause they promoted you on the mobile app... the promo ended recently hence the decline.

[shazzbaa]

5,000 new people found my comic in a week, but only about 100 could make a comment?

I always wondered why those comics that has like 200k+ subs gets only 15k likes and only 700~3k leave a comment.

This is actually pretty normal with human engagement, in my experience! Look at other comics -- here on Tapas, too -- and do the math for what percentage of their subscribers leave comments, or how many comments they got on a page versus how many views they got on that page, and you might be surprised. I think a lot of people who are frustrated at the level of engagement they're getting don't realise how normal those low percentages are, on any kind of social media. The number of folks who interact with you is ALMOST ALWAYS only a tiny percentage of the people who follow you.

This is even more true on mobile -- mobile readers, in my experience, are way more likely to casually read without commenting or interacting. When I got featured in the Daily Snack here on Tapas, my subs got a pretty decent boost... but the number of comments and likes I was getting barely changed at all.

I can't speak to whether everyone on LINE Webtoon is real, but this isn't actually strange behaviour! If you got a comment for every 50 people that looked at your work, then the level of engagement you're getting is really pretty good!!

[fleohr]

Hmmm it makes more sense now, thank you for your input!

[lunchtiiime12]

I would agree with you, however, I was still on the front page for several hours after the hard stop in subscriptions.

[CarolRiverArt]

I agree,I think at least in cross promotion, the subscribers are real people. When I started the comic, some comments appeared and get deleted, it was weird. felt somehow "algoritmic"

[lunchtiiime12]

I'm aware of the percentages of interaction with mobile, etc. I've been doing this for a couple of years now and experienced a lot of failures. It's just so hard to believe that these people actually exist. It's hard to believe there's not "spillover" from word of mouth when you suddenly gain 6,000 new subscribers. To go from 1K a day to, I don't know, 6, is very, very strange. It's not like I'm not still in the top 30 comedy, etc.

[beta1042]

This month has been pretty bad and weird for me. I can tell I'm getting new subs cause my likes go up and I get new comments throughout my posted stuff, but my sub count just doesn't rise. I feel like the only explanation is it's been unsub mania this month.

cross promo does seem to be the best cause it sends the readers who are less likely to unsub and more likely to be engaged.

[NanettesClouds]

For context, I don't use webtoons, and I'm not salty about my audience size. I just find webtoons incredibly shady.

I've been pretty suspicious of Webtoons for awhile now, there's a lot about their platform that doesn't make sense to me. They seem to be spending a lot of money, both through advertising and paying their featured creators (through patreon, which is fishy to me, why not pay their creators directly though something like PayPal or Stripe?), but there doesn't seem to be any way that Webtoons generates its money. Why is Naever pumping so much money into a webcomic platform that doesn't make any of that money back?

On top of that you have tons of fishy things happening with viewcounts like what you've experienced.another example is what happened a couple months ago, when all of a sudden (after webtoon raised the bar for its patreon support program) lots of people started losing hundreds of subscribers over night.
Just as weird (but no one complains about it) is that lots of, lets face it, bad comics, that are uploaded to Webtoons seem to get wild amounts of attention as soon as they're uploaded? How? Why? Some people will say it's because Webtoons has a larger userbase than Tapas, but you know what has a larger userbase than Tapas AND Webtoons? goddamned YOUTUBE, and when garbage gets uploaded there it doesn't find ANY viewers (granted youtube has a very different algorithm and search function from webtoons and tapas, but like, how much is that algorithm on webtoons actually helping people?)

The engagement thing is normal, just like @shazzbaa said, but to me the weird thing about your situation is how abruptly everything stopped?

My theory, is that Webtoons has been using bots and/or click farms to inflate its userbase to rise up the ranks of various mobile app stores, and then it uses that seemingly huge userbase (and its deep pockets) to attract content creators to its website. Back when the unsubscription thing happened, they realized that they were spending too much money on their featured creators because of those bots, so they had them all unsubscribe from those creators to knock them down a couple notches on their patreon support program.

That said, I don't know what's happening with your situation specifically.

[PervertOldMan]

Sounds totally normal to me.

It's normal for you to get around 1000-2000 subs a day when you are on featured sections, when they take you down, you come back to your normal pace.

Genres' top 6 to 30 dont actually give you many view/sub, not many readers open that list to check it out, even if they do, it's a small chance that they will tap on your comic. What valuable is top 5, which can give you 500-1000subs a day, since there's a top 5 list appear on the front page and everytime you finish reading an random comic episode.

About the reader interaction, most of the readers only read and go, it's like that everywhere, even here on tapas, if 100 subs can give you 5 comments and 20 likes, you can thanks god for it already.

WT audience's size can be seen by how much money they're throwing out for pledge program, that program is mainly for advertisment, yes, but do you really think they're giving it out totally for free ? No, they are getting money back from that huge traffic of wt discover itself.

[NanettesClouds]

No, they are getting money back from that huge traffic of wt discover itself.

How are the turning that traffic into money though? They don't run advertisements on the site do they? Otherwise they're selling users information, which, okay that's just a fact of life nowadays, but they spend a lot of money, can selling user data really pay those bills? (I know that Naever also has money coming in from its other platforms that it's putting towards webtoons, but again, why are they putting money into something that's not generating much back?)

[beta1042]

I see ads on Mobile, so that's my guess.

[ghostmaya]

Yeah I Dunno why they comment with nice comment then delete it after many months

[scythe]

A lot of theories being bounced around in here, with not much to back them up.

I've had this happen to me a bunch of times, but never which such incredible results, so well done for having such an engaging comic OP.

When you get a spot at the bottom of the homepage, you actually come up at the bottom of comic episodes in the app, featured and discover, which explains the insane number of new views and subs. But I don't think you should expect these subs to be as engaged in the future as the ones who found your comic more organically. In fact, a decent number of them will unsub now that the tap's turned off.

It's plausible that some editor at Line just likes your comic and was able to slot it in to whatever theme they were going with at the time. It looks like it's cats this week. Maybe if they see you've gained enough new subs they take you off, or maybe they were going to take you off anyway, I don't think there's a way we can know how that process works as it doesn't appear to be regular.

As for how Line Wetbtoon makes it's money, this isn't a secret, and it's nothing shady. It's a subsidiary of the monolithic Naver corporation, and LW is just one of a few platforms it's investing in. They've openly stated that their goal is to tap into the US market and build a large database of users there. Clearly, they see webcomics as a way to do that, and if you can't figure out how Naver might be able to make money from building a large database of (comparatively rich) US users, then you're probably just not using your imagination.

[scythe]

YouTube doesn't make a profit. Ditto Twitter. The only conclusion to draw is that like many other companies before them, they're playing a long game with hopes of future dividends, even if they wind up coming from tangential sources.