Different platforms: What are pros and cons?

I've compiled my experiences,opinions about various webcomic platforms into a twitter thread some time ago
https://twitter.com/Animefanka/status/163164547167969689853

RoyalRoad is LitRPG fan base. Highest earning author I know publishes on RoyalRoad only. They earn a lot... public can be picky...

Your work gets stolen from RoyalRoad but same as Tapas. Scrapper sites pretty much steal from every site except the less known.

Tapas you will thrive as long as you know that most target audience is looking for stories similar to korean novels/manhwa.

Webtoon. You just need good art. Story is secondary. You can even get serialized as long as your art is good. Seen horrible story-telling outside the famous translations webtoons publishes (few canvas authors that get promoted to official authors). Seen lots of canvas with a great story and followers get ignored by webtoons. They care more about art.
Scrapper sites steal a lot.

Wattpad. It is not like it used to be. Now it is extremely hard to get traction. Your novel can be the best but it can go unoticed for months or even years on wattpad.

Blogspot. Just a webpage without owning a webpage. Like you said a diary.

Webnovel. Never publish there! Never ever ever!!!! Contracts take all your intelectual property. Not to mention you only get paid for $200 a month. They require you to publish 1.5k words per day. A max bonus of extra $200 USD a month. So basically, you have to write a book each month for arpund $200 USD and a max amount of $400 USD only if your novel met other requirements.

Amazon. Self promote if you want to sell. You need to have a finished quality product. It should be used in conjunction with other media. Lack further experience.

Authors there make money using patreon. So that's a really important detail. But the fans are crazy loyal like you said paying lots of money per month.

I've shopped around on a lot of platforms. I really think it depends on what you want to write and what your endgame is. If you want self-publish, you're better off going with platforms like Amazon KDP or Barnes and Noble. The process is similar for publishing on both platforms and you get to keep your rights.

Vella, for those in the States, behaves like any other serial fiction platform. You upload a chapter to the platform between 600-5000 words. It's "guaranteed" money. If someone pays to unlock a chapter, you get credited the royalty for it. No $25 payment limit before you can get paid.

From what little I know, bad boy/good girl romances and related subgenres (mafia, werewolf, etc.) are still popular there, along with KPop RPF (real-person fic) and other forms of fanfic. It's the most diverse I've seen in terms of language. There's a few other languages than English where it's possible to gain traction.

Searchability on the site is not the best, but it seems to have improved since the last time I used it. Still no way to see for newest updates unless you're searching by specific tags. No ability to schedule chapters (not even on Premium. What is it even for?) Extremely difficult to promote/network with other writers since the forums shut down in mid-2020.

Of the sites I've tried, it's the one most reliant on writing what's popular. You kind of need a built-in audience before you start posting because there's so few ways to get noticed.

LitRPG and Fantasy with strong elements of progression are most popular there. Common anime/light novel elements like isekai are also a plus. Heavy focus on romance is a minus. However, it's not impossible to gain traction even if you're writing less popular genres. While there's no way to make money through the site itself, there are built-in ways to link your story to Patreon and other similar sites.

Fantasy and LGBT+ stuff generally do best here for both comics and novels. For novels, there's a 15,000 character (NOT WORD) limit per update, which depending on the type of story you're writing and how you break up + schedule chapters, this can either work in your story's favor or against it. Since your story only shows up under the first genre you set it as, choosing that genre is very important.

FictionPress: Basically dead when I tried it in 2020-2021. Cumbersome to use too if you didn't grow up posting on Fanfic.net.

Edit: This Twitter thread18 did a pretty thorough look into a lot of web novel websites + I helped fill in some of the gaps.

Wattpad is really predatory, imo. I was on there for a few months before moving over to Tapas. You have to commit yourself fully to their company: join their feedback groups, enter their contests, etc. I noticed too that if you want to enter their paid program, there are more hopes to jump through. I did look into their serial app to compete with Vella, and you can't see any information about their TOS or any payment or rights. I know that it's "invite only" but the lack of information seemed like a red flag to me.

I watched a Youtube video about Wattpad's annual "convention". The whole thing had major MLM vibes to me. I'm never going back to Wattpad.

Those lists do exist. You just search them on google. They compile multiple experiences and state the reasons why and which websites are predatory. I recently posted a link with such a site in one of the threads here. Kind of lost track which thread but as you can guess predatory companies is not a rare topic but with good reason.

Point is sites explaining such things are a click away.

I think OP should maybe be a bit more open about a vested interest here. According to LinkedIn, she's an employee of Mythrill, and from her posting habits, it seems pretty transparent that she's on this forum to market the platform.

Also, during my digging, I discovered that Mythrill uses AI for making the artwork for their various covers and "Lore Cards", which is a hidden factor that may potentially impact decisions. Tapas, of course, has recently banned all use of AI for art on covers and comics for both ethical concerns, but also the muddiness of copyright around it.

I also notice, that unlike Tapas, where you can withdraw earnings at $25, Mythrill it's double that; you need to accumulate $50 to withdraw... That's quite a lot for a novel, especially on a platform that's currently really hard to find on Google. Probably a lot easier currently for creators with a large presence online who can act as brand ambassadors and try to draw people to the platform... like OP appears to be doing here.... (bit cheeky... and against forum rules. The mods are lenient, but I feel like the sheer amount is taking the piss now).

Tapas contracts are pretty good (speaking from personal experience), but usually need a very big readership to get or to make them work. You keep all the rights to the IP. You're allowed to post to other platforms unless it's a "Tapas Original" series made explicitly for the platform. Making money from the contracts does require a very large audience, but because it has a tipping system with ink, you can actually make a fair bit of cash from the site if you have a medium-sized following, and highly engaged reader base. I've made somewhere close to $800 on Tapas over the few years I've been making my comic, which presently just hit 2500 subs. I make more on top of that from my Patreon, and the recent print book kickstarter.

Like most platforms, Tapas works best if you make or customise your work to fit in with what performs well here specifically. You definitely need to be making something with a core audience in the late teens to mid twenties region, and because it's more like a comics platform that also has novels, you need strong presentation that would appeal to somebody who likes modern webcomics or east asian "Light Novels", so colourful illustrated covers focused on appealing characters with polished typography tend to perform well. I know some people who have a colourful illustrated cover on Tapas, and then a moody photo-montage type one on Radish for the same book. Tapas readers like short chapters and stories that get started quickly with a strong "elevator pitch" type concept, and they like a focus on characters and emotional drama or conflict over physical or political-focused plots. Fantasy is a popular genre, but is dominated by Isekai because of the appeal of a "relateable" young protagonist from our world and the ease of exposition that facilitates, and Fantasy with a strong Romance element tends to perform best.
An advantage of Tapas is that because the strongest promo is internal features on the app itself, it's less reliant than a lot of platforms on being well-known or having an established fanbase. If you make something very polished, and very suited to the platform and get noticed by the staff, you can hypothetically blow up here out of nowhere.

Some platforms do the quality vetting and making your work fit in for you, like Mythrill, where they'll only let you in if they think your work will perform well (like a traditional publisher. Radish does this too), and then giving you art in a style that's on-brand and they feel will appeal to the app userbase (Radish doesn't do this). On Tapas, its up to you to do the work of trying to figure out what to upload, how to present and describe it etc. which a lot of people seem to struggle with. A bit of branding-savvy goes a long way on an open platform like this.

No, I was actually noticing everything you said in all the various threads the past few days where you've been plugging Mythrill. Often in threads where it really wasn't related to the thread topic. Even in this one, you're trying to frame it now that you're caught out, like you're giving an even-handed comparison of what's out there... but you're not. The other sites are often very light on detail, and then suddenly there's this entire sales pitch about Mythrill. It makes it pretty obvious that your aim was to make the comparison look as favourable as possible. The stuff you said about Tapas isn't even factually correct; some of the highest earning works on the site aren't originals, and I know at least one creator whose non-Tapas-Original work makes more money than their Original one.

It doesn't matter that you're not being paid to come to other sites and to espouse the platform. It clearly financially benefits you to build awareness, in order to boost the number of titles on the site, raise awareness among people who are into webnovels, push traffic on the site and app and have more people saying things about it online (in more positive terms than the Reddit threads that came up...) to increase how easy it is to find in searches and how positive the stuff that comes up in searches is.

So I stand by what I said. It's against forum rules, it's cheeky, and it's kind of taking the piss when Tapas are hosting these forums.

You know that marketing your Webtoon is ALSO against the forum rules, right? The mods tolerate it, but you're not meant to.

Maybe do your research? Like the absolute most basic kind of reading the rules of the platform you're on?