I've been studying that for a few months now. Obviously anything with editors/moderators has a directive, bias, or agenda. So it is only logical to try and discern what they promote in order to choose for/against meeting their agenda and getting maximum benefits (selling out) or doing your own thing and accepting what comes (or failing miserably).
Line Webtoons has several ways of gauging success, and some comes from Webtoons itself and other aspects come purely from (we hope) the audience visiting the pages on Webtoons.
• Subscribers
• Likes
• Popularity (not sure how this is actually compiled by Webtoons)
• Views
• Recommended status
• Featured status
Subscribers, Likes and Views (and popularity to some degree) come from the audience, but can be led, fed, and encouraged or discouraged by Webtoons. A person will find it difficult to succeed at these without the help of the Webtoons editors, but they can succeed without the help of Webtoons editors if they promote themselves well enough and have an excellent product that finds an audience sans help of Webtoons editors.
Recommended and Featured status comes purely from the Webtoons hierarchy. They choose whom they promote in Recommended and whom they hire as a featured comic. There is supposedly NOTHING you can do to influence these elements, outside of popularity gained on Webtoons.
Once you get enough Likes, maybe popularity, you rise up into side bars recommending the best titles of certain genre. So even without Webtoons help, you can get in people's faces via those bars... if you get enough likes. How do you get likes? You get likes by getting noticed, getting subscribers, and becoming more popular.
Ultimately, you almost need Webtoons to recommend your comic at some time, because once you are on that carousel of comics, you get heavily noticed and the audience will determine your fate after that. If your comic enthuses, your subscribers and views rise, and your like go through the roof, causing you popularity, so you then appear on the sidebar.
The crux: what comics does Line Webtoons generally put in the recommended tier at the top of the page?
BL, Gay, Witch, Witchcraft, D&D, Space/Sci-Fi, libidinous romance
That covers 90%+ of the material they put on recommended. Perhaps even closer to 100%! So if you want to get recommended, it is extremely difficult to get there if you are making a comic about puppies and kitties. Likewise, if you are making a comic about steel workers in Pittsburgh, you will almost certainly be shut out forever.
On the other hand, there are some AMAZING comics that NEVER get recognized by Webtoons and they fulfill many of those categories. "APRICOT COOKIES" comes to mind readily--clean, amazing artwork that looks so professional it puts all the other comics to shame, it's about a magical girl, has libidinous tones, has gay/lesbian tones, and deals with witchcraft... never recommended and has an extremely low subscriber count. "in SECURITY" also has incredible art and a brilliant narrative/voice unlike anything else, and despite 150+ chapters it was NEVER recommended yet. problem: it doesn't have one of those categories I mentioned.
You can find quite a few comics that fall into the later category, but few that fall into the previous. I am curious why "APRICOT COOKIES" fell through the cracks... could it be that it heavily relies on a Japanese paradigm and Webtoons is centered more on promoting Korean-themed/influenced work? Probably. The nationalistic/racial component can't be denied sometimes.
Personally, I feel many BL/Romance comics over there are gaining subscribers quite fast and quite unnaturally. There might be a link over to the Korean/Asian Webtoons sites that encourages people to cross over and subscribe to these comics in order to support local artists. That would be unfortunate, since Webtoons in America should be promoting the western artists and the asian Webtoons promoting the asian/local artists, in order to open up markets that cater to specific regions and languages and cultures, etc.
Ultimately, Webtoons is doing a disservice to venal artists. People "over here" will aim to meet cultural needs of a Korean editorship. It makes those artists waste their lives gaining a little money and yet cramming themselves into a cul-de-sac or artistic misperception. Face it: there is no broader audience for the asian-styled libidinous gay/BL/romance comics. This site will doom those artists to stay inside that corral, because you can't use that work to get the higher paying jobs in almost all avenues of ad work, American comics, western animation, etc. The types of comics succeeding on Webtoons also have severe artistic limitations allowing artists to be lazy and not develop themselves--constant headshots, reused panels, Q&As, non-story announcements, lack of perspective, lack of dynamic storytelling and angles, etc., while popularity relies on mediocre story and work that has exceptionally talented painting/coloring. So if someone wants to get paid more than $1000/mo. doing comic work, they will have to see through that veil and aim for better work further out in the field and possibly miss the temporary carrot-on-the-stick which Webtoons puts out before the western comic community.
That's my 2 cents. Turned out to be more like a few Hamiltons, though.