In my experience, industry buys another industry for 2 reasons:
-To reach what was unreacheable for them, as in age, lenguague, geography. The new owner will not change much of everything because he likes what has been done by now, but of course now they will control the new direction, or...
-To stop a growing enemy to grow too much, and stop it, to later add it to their own resources. This could meant rebranding, redirecting, and closing. The last one its the most stupid, because the people will just migrate to another competitor, so I don't think that that will happen.
I mean, do that even before it gets acquired. Never get stuck on a plataform that's most definately not your friend. The only place you can trust to throw your whole archive at and never see it go outside of your control, is your own website.
Honestly, that statement on the thread was probably considered a good idea so we wouldn't take the word of a weird rumour site and now it's kind of a mistake, but hindsight is 20/20.
Honestly, this is my take on it. Kakao wants to export their comics and novels to the US / the west, so they bought out a company similar to theirs that currently has the biggest success. No brainer.
With all due respect to all creators (myself included), I don't think they give a damn about our free stories. It's nice to have them here to attract more readers, but that's it. The idea that they're secretly after the rights to however many thousand underperforming series is a bit ridiculous. Things will, most likely, continue as they are for free stories; and yes, that includes little to no visibility or opportunities besides staff picks. Not sure if it means we'll see an increase in imported series and a decrease in English originals, Premium and Originals-wise, however.
i'm well aware of the need to put your eggs in more than one basket, it's a word of advice that's been given here plenty of times. my only reason for not doing so before hand was because i was putting junk/practice work here so that once i had better quality content i could be spreading that around instead.
as for the acquisition in general all i feel at this point is indifferent. i do think tapas and the ceo could've been more transparent but what's done is done.
We do not know if this was an intentional lie. The CEO could had his belives that this was not gonna happen, but some circumstance made it so. And perhaps even he got surprised.
All the new redesigns and re-structuring we have withness only make Tapas more solid and I do not think that the new owner will buy this just to close it.
I bet that Tapas was gonna sell and made all this look good at the market but, the who that become the new owner might be the last one the CEO wanted???
We do not know.
I’m waiting for a response before I panic.
@ratique
No one's assuming the new owner is going to kill tapas lol. That would just be stupid.
And unless they're an insanely disorganised company or he is an incompetent CEO, they knew this was happening or at the very least were sure enough that his answer is at best evasive to a fault. They could've just said "We're exploring all options and this isn't off the table".
The CEO knows everything that's happening in their company, never assume they don't.
True, Ratique was just delivering the CEO's message. Never shoot the messenger, specially if they are fast and responsive.
hides in the corner, rocking back and forth, trying not to remember the NCSoft shutdown of City of Heroes in 2012
Well, I can do nothing but wait and watch, and mirror my posts as usual, so I won't start panicking yet.
Kakao/Daum has a presence here for quite a while, it's just nobody noticed it because people think webtoons, they think LINE Webtoons even though Kakaopage is Naver Webtoons biggest competitor in Korea. I mean how many people here know that most of translated webtoons here are from Kakaopage? I guess the clues were always there, the app icons for Tapas and Kakaopage did have very similar colors.
I guess Kakao bought Tapas because it was far less trouble trying to build a site from scratch and they already have foothold in the American market with Tapas. I wonder if Kakao will be buy Delitoon next seeing it's the first webtoon site in France and they a lot Kakaopage webtoons and The Beginning after the End.
lol bigger companies usually have more failure prone leaders just because one failure can easily be hidden within the vast depths of the giant company's maw
Yes Tapas is a small slice for them. So risk-taking is a possibility. Probably even more likely, because potentially more profitable, than playing it safe. We just have to hope it will fall somewhat in the middle.
If risk taking is a possibility maybe there is hope for genres outside of romance to finally get visibility
If you check Kakao original page, you'll see the most probable kind of content we'll have. My bet is we'll get muuuuuchh more of what is already around. It's what sells, guys, and kakao wants to get at least 3x more what they invested to buy Tapas.
Will be interesting to see how it shakes up. Most likely we'll get more of a push towards a Webtoon standard with the long scroll. The thing that I'd be most interested in seeing is if the expectation we see for Premium changes--like will it stay the same amount of work and pay? Will it be more? Will it be less? What's expected for Premium content is also the implied expectation that is set for everyone else. If the pay can get better, it could potentially open doors for people since ad revenue never cuts that mustard. If it just continues to push out content that was already published in other countries than make more original stuff...ehh...
As for IP rights I assume people debate those contracts on a case by case basis anyway--like you do not have to take the first contract you are given (and we've already had threads on that. Contracts can be debated for like months and months and months with publishing)