Hello!
Do you know voyce.me? It's new comic and novel platform.
Any thoughts about it?
Link to page
created
Jun '21
last reply
Jun '21
- 25
replies
- 6.5k
views
- 12
users
- 48
likes
- 2
links
Hello!
Do you know voyce.me? It's new comic and novel platform.
Any thoughts about it?
Link to page
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 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:
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:
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
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.
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.
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....