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Jun 2021

Checked their tos and seems like I'd need to censor my works even more than on webtoon, so that's a nope for me (love the sites with mature content warnings that you can't put any mature content behind)

They really need to hire a decent UX and UI designer. It's extremely overwhelming and busy to look at and doesn't put the content a reader would want to find in the most visible and accessible place to find it. Using fan art to decorate the site looks unprofessional and is just asking for a C&D. Personally I'm not feeling it.

yeah, the website doesn't look good at all. They say there'd be an update. But besides that I'm wondering about comics views some of them looks fake

Yeah, the view numbers don't track well with the follower numbers and page counts, so either a lot of people read comics without making an account and following or the numbers are being pushed somehow or even fabricated. In either case, it makes the numbers useless and if so few people who look at a comic were actually willing to make an account, you'd be better off hosting on a website of your own (or... you know, on a site with lots of readers who are signed up and a dedicated app... like a certain one named after delicious small plates of food whose forum we might be on right now).

This is gonna be long but I want to preface this with two points:

  • I don't own or run anything competing with VoyceMe in any way
  • I've been in a single conversation with the owner and he seems like an outwardly nice person

Okay my starting statement, I personally believe VoyceMe is either a grift or the work of an incredibly short-sighted individual with no real experience in the comics industry or in running a business of any kind. The owner Telano is a 20 year old with some funding, not Y-Combinator, dunno which specifically.

The way his site is run and some of the things I know behind the scenes cause me internal haemorrhaging:

  • The VoyceMe originals give up 50% of their IP to the site
  • Assistants and some originals creators* afaik are "paid" with percentage of the future potential revenue of the IP

  • To have a creator account you must hand over your phone number and during one of their "Town Hall" style events on their discord; the owner, Telano, when questioned on the kind of security being used to keep such personal information safe, he said he'd pay people to hack it to prove it's secure/find insecurities. This is not how Cyber Security works and this is not how you gain any level of trust with users.

  • There seem to be no developers on staff and he's relying on the work of the service WebDesignProfs. From what I've heard through the grape vine, they're a super cheap method of getting a site made. They basically kitbash templates with the occasional original code/tool implemented.

  • There is just Tokyo Ghoul art on the main page, this one is just stupid

  • There is a clown/luffy face on the trending tab, again just another weird dumb thing
  • If you're someone that cares about the kind of people on there, while the owner and management seem like very normal people. A very common thing is to find comicsgaters and people throwing slurs around like the world is ending. Although this may be changing as I've seen a few of them get banned but just letting you know

I could go on but the long and short is, they're at the very best super unprofessional and not worth investing in because their failure is imminent, and at the very worst, big grift for free IP run by some kid with more money than knowledge. You decide

*This has not been completely confirmed but I've spoken with one or two insiders who said this to me, the assistants is confirmed though, I've seen the receipts.

EDIT: Some grammar and ease of reading edits

Sounds like some kind of mafia. The kind of fledgling that knows nothing and waits to be consumed by a real dark and murky organisation and for everyone in the mafia to die in a gruesome way.

I personally do not like the website. It's hard to add comics, a lot of errors pop up. Few impressions, no possibility to contact the reader because there is no possibility to comment.

I tried to talk to the founder. I asked him some questions etc. but after a while he stopped replying to me. I was ignored.

This behaviour speaks for itself.
And yes - I think they have bought artificial traffic. It's impossible for one comic from the original series to have 18k views and another barely 200.

When I read the name, I thought it's a site about voice acting :open_mouth:

This is so bad, holy crud! You'd think a 50% stake in IP would at least mean the creator is getting paid a healthy salary. 'Potential future revenue', heck no. I hope nobody has signed a contract with these guys for any work they care about.

I can't see this site surviving for very long at all. Depending on the contracts, when it dies, it may take that IP with it, and the creators will have lost the ability to publish their stories elsewhere.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is an IP grift, as you stated. Suck in a bunch of naive creators, hold their IP, then if they ever publish elsewhere and get big, the Voyce owner can sue for a cut of the revenue.

A few people have and they got someone who was popular on TikTok Brendan Chen as the creator of God Game, I think him they're paying money.

it is, some of the originals are from people popular outside of the site. Some of them are quite popular too

Yeah I heard about this too, like you said they seem nice but I wouldn't encourage anyone to put their comic their at the moment.

site looks cluttered at the moment. might need to be clean up and organized in order to attract more people or not, especially reading the mention suspicious activities the site owner is doing with the creators and etc.

I don't have anything to add to the comic, but the site has more flaws than pros and what I don't like is that the moment they invite you to become the main series they say that you can't publish on other sites and if you have published you have to delete everything. I don't think it's fair when you already have a large reader base on Tapas for example. It's a difficult decision to make because you're not 100% going to make money like they say. So it's a tough call....

i somehow managed to skip that one when i confirmed i was not a robot......however, i am not comfortable about a site asking for phone numbers....