Hopefully I'm allowed to post this here and I apologize if this topic is cover before.
Someone on reddit talked about the pay that comes with being an Original Webtoon creative and it's not very good
Honestly I really wanted to be an original someday, but the pay and time is not worth it. You're better off sticking to canvas and utilizing patreon, kofi, ad revenue, and others.
Sep '22
Oct '22
I read that and have some comments. If it takes you 88+hours to draw 40 panels (2 hours for one panel), this is not the job for you. Comics have always been a fast drawers platform. You seriously have to be honest with yourself at what you can draw for the money you can make from it. The best thing is that's a flat amount of money every week that you can build on. Tell most content creators your base is $800 plus whatever you will make from merch and other sources, and that doesn't seem too bad. Also once you become an Original Creator, this is now your job. So everything should be put into making money with it. Promotion, advertisement,... everything. It's officially not a hobby. Finally, if this is your first art job, think of it as a paid internship. You're getting paid to learn how to be a better artist/storyteller. You can build an audience while still getting some type of cash, unlike a lot of us that still work a full time job. This might not make you rich or stable, but its a stepping stone to greater things.
As a former Originals creator I completely agree. At the time, it was a good get for me because my first ever comics job for a popular “news” site (which paid $600, with full ownership of the work and ability to repost wherever after 6months) set the bar low.
I also thought I could maintain both jobs because I drew simply and it didn’t seem like it took me much time but the Webtoon gig gave me ZERO time to focus on anything else which really hurt my ability to make money from multiple revenues. And the whole time during my contract my Patreon was stuck at around the $80-100 mark so it didn’t help much.
I also think people don’t understand how much spaghetti you have to throw at the wall to make something that sticks. I was stuck doing this one comic that I knew wasn’t sticking until my contract came to an end. It took a couple years and maybe a dozen attempts of different comics in different styles with different ideas— literally hundreds of pages— before I nailed a sticky project and got my Patreon up to about the amount I made with Webtoon but with much less work AND the ability to work on multiple things.
I will also add that print publishing makes me the bulk of my income and has sustained me even before my recent Patreon surge. I know that this wouldn’t be the case for a lot of folks but I think its a commonly overlooked avenue of income. Its not for everyone but its a developable skill.
I just hate to think that people see something as ephemeral as a website owned by some wealthy conglomerate that can nix your contract if its not working for their audience as the end all be all of comics careers. Its a scary thought.
yeah a lot of the things coming to light about more of the predatory Webtoon contracts (especially recently on twitter a lot of people started talking about how they got a raw deal) are making them seem less and less appealing all the time. I'm sure that people who are very successful there are able to pull a better contract, like I'm fairly positive Lore Olympus is getting a good deal (or maybe she's not! I don't know anymore because of how crappy a lot of these deals are looking!), but if you're just an average Original, the perks don't seem to outweigh the negatives. That and there's so many Originals now! they barely get any promotion time at all, it's very sad.
this brought to mind the open letter12 that loebot's creator had written and shared
if i'm not mistaken there was a response from webtoons supposedly about this as well as other claims regarding their practices but i think all of this is one of the many reasons i feel like i've been drifting away from comics and art because as much as it's a passion of mine and as much as i'm willing to put in work seeing stuff harm folks to such a degree is more than upsetting because it takes advantage of that
I think it's safe to say that just in general when it comes to hosting sites, whether tapas or webtoons or otherwise, you really have to be mindful of what you could be getting into because the more time passes the more folks are gonna be forced to pay attention to this kind of stuff
Or you can be one of Webtoons' little experiments and flop because they thought 4 hours of promotion was all they needed to make the next Lore Olympus, and didn't tell you about it until after the fact lol (the tweet was deleted so I'm not going to share who, but it was a comic I follow).
Corporations are not your friends. There isn't going to be a stepping stone if you burn out or develop an RSI to keep up with their ridiculous standards, let alone if you're in one of their second class countries and not even getting paid what you're owed. Or not getting paid at all, during pre-production even after you've gotten viral, which is a thing they also do35!
It's nice to know that print media is still a viable option. I always worried that the majority would rather have digital content
I remember you did print publishing, but you were a Webtoons Original creator as well? What's your series called? 
Update to the whole thing.45 So Webtoons just wants to solve the issues of the individual artists that voiced concerns and push this under the rug, huh.
Not surprised reading all this. Im not say this would be the tokyo pop disaster that lead to so many artists being screwed over. Mostly cus I doubt Webtoons is going to suddenly shut down and leave people in copyright limbo as a final screw you.
But Im getting very... Web novel shady contracts vibes from this whole situation. Not quite as predatory but its still there, with how they treat their creators; calling them a side hustle, low pay, VERY little advertising for originals not their big boys, long insane amount of work for said little pay(some people are not aware how that can actually cripple people, being stepping stone is not a good reason to do that... ).
I really Am not surprised, but honestly Im just disappointed. I feel if things dont change it will just be the one of those contracts that that other creators warn about to stay away.
Like Tokyo pop's rising stars
closed Oct 19, '22
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