The core issue of Tapastic

This a fairly big nut to crack in one reply.

To begin, we understand what you are saying, and there are days when we feel the way you must be feeling. You know, those days were you update and push to social media, don't make "Trending", stay on "Fresh" for only five minutes, and then get seemingly swept under the rug until your next update. 10+ hours of work on one page, gone in a moment. You watch your sub count actually decline because your update reminded some people to unsubscribe. Meanwhile some seemingly new creator out of no where posts only two one page episodes for a-gag-a-day (8 panels total) and receives a Staff Pick and a Daily Snack and just catapults up to 2K+ subs with a snap of the fingers. You're left wondering . . . whhhhaaaattttt. How's that fair?! It's not.

Unfortunately its just business.

The truth is that Tapas is a business and Tapas has to change in order to survive. Remember Inkblazers? Ultimately they couldn't stay open because they couldn't remain revenue neutral. The webcomics model is changing. Ad revenue continues to drastically decline. Tapastic had to find a new way to make ends meet and pay back their preferred shareholders.

Readers are constantly going more and more mobile with desktop users on the decline. Tapastic had to keep up with the times by building an app, one that likely cost well northwards of $500,000. We estimated in another post that their payroll is probably in the neighborhood of $50,000-60,000/mo. Ads aren't enough so they've gone into monitizing the reader base into purchasing Premium Content. First comics and now books.

Premium content is likely now the main source of revenue for Tapas, followed by their 15% tipping commission, and lastly ads. In order to stay in the green, Tapas is going to promote whatever generates the most income for them, which means the Premium Content. This explains why the Top Ten is the top ten. They likely also have metrics that measure which merchandise is selling and which series have the highest tipping activity and features them in the t-shirt banners and the tipping section.

As far as determining who gets a spotlight or a daily snack, a lot comes down to social media shares. Tapas wants to continuously grow its reader base. They know that for every X new readers they are going to sell X amount of Premium Content. If they feature something that ends up going viral on social media, most likely its going to draw new readers to the website or app. This is why gag-a-days are so popular for being featured. Humor sells, especially at 4 panels with a beginning middle and end, that takes less than thirty seconds to consume vs. a long form that requires a serious time investment on the reader's part and no quick laugh. This is also why content that is highly relevant gets featured. For example, back in July 2016 when Pokemon GO came out, if you did something related to it on Tapas, odds were you got a Daily Snack. Meanwhile if you create something that just doesn't seem like its going to get much attention, they aren't going to feature it. Tapas can only feature so many things each day and each feature they hand out is essentially a limited quantity valuable resource worth real money (tips/subs/Premium Content sales) so they're going to be selective on who gets a nod. Also series that they spent $10,000 back when Tapastic first opened as a bounty to attract big name creators are also going to get priority because there's an underlying investment the company wants to earn back.

It's not personal, it's just business. If your book you submit to be premium isn't going to be profitable after editing expenses, staff is going to reject. If your comic series doesn't come off as being something that is going to draw in new readers, it won't get featured.

We hate to see Tapas changing but it is the nature of the beast because publishing as a whole is changing. Hiveworks in its current state will probably not last. Ad revenue continues to decline and it has no mobile app. Webtoons oneday someday eventually has to make sense financially to LINE, otherwise there will be major changes there.

Tapas is just trying to get ahead of the ball because they see the writing on the wall. Currently their focus is to just keep growing as quickly as possible, which means sometime this year they will be adding open ebook publishing on the app. The goal there is to cut into Wattpad's huge readership (>2x Webtoons) and ramp up their own readership, then sell Premium Content to the new readers.

Most creators here, ourselves included, would LOVE for things to remain back in Tapastic, when things were a lot more relaxed and free and it seemed like creators had the run of the site. However that just can't continue because its not sustainable. So what we're seeing and what we're feeling is facing reality.

Staff time is increasingly becoming limited as they all have increasingly more tasks to do, so you may not get a reply.

We will do our best to quickly answer your seven bullet points:

1) Spotlights are based on what Tapas reader demographics are. Fantasy. Romance. LGTB. OR anything the content director deems highly sharable. As you point out, pretty art makes it highly sharable. OR highly relevant. Heroin use is up 145% since 2007. It's a topic that is commonly making the news.

2) Banners "never change" because they have to be hard coded in. Hard coding = time = money. Its less expensive to leave things static.

3) Sales metrics likely drive which shirt banners are present. If its selling the most, it's going to be shown. Also the banners are likely hard coded in as well. (See 2)

4) Trending is likely based on (Views + Likes + New Subs)/Old Subs over a period of one minute, with new subs having a much higher weight than likes, which is a much higher weight than views. If you have a bunch of subs that don't engage with your series, you won't trend, or if you have 10,000 subs but they trickle read over seven days, you won't trend because it has to happen in a short period of time.

5) Top 10 is for selling Premium Content. Premium Content sales from the top 10 likely heavily outweighs any revenue the actual top 10 generate via tipping and ad revenue.

6) Patreon would conflict with tipping. It's also directing traffic to go outside of Tapas. What for-profit business would want to direct traffic away from their site?

7) Can't answer this one since "quality content" is subjective. It would be great to see Tapas hire a community manager to try to engage with all of us on social media, answer forum posts, and make us feel valued. That used to be Michael's job, but he's so busy now with so many other things, he really can't do it any more. Tapas probably can't justify the cost in hiring a community manager either because of the cost/benefit analysis.

To close, we're not crazy happy about how Tapas is changing, but we realize that its just reality, and have to learn to accept the changes. All things considered it's the best game in town because:

A) its not gated so anyone can publish
B) offers mobile app reading
C) anyone can earn some income (tips+ad revenue)
D) there is a large readership already available for free if you can get their attention (Trending or a Staff Feature)
E) an excellent creator community
F) free hosting and no need to manage a website
G) Long term survival rate

There's not too many other options out there that meet all these criteria. . . if any.

The current spotlight is perhaps a little too fluffy and glosses over the nastier aspects of trying to quit, but it's definitely not condoning drug abuse. I'd be more concerned if they had featured one of the many BL comics with smoker protagonists, that typically include pin-up art of them posing attractively with cigarettes.

Yeah, it honestly does feel missing. I think Michael plus the forum mods are pretty much the closest to that role on the forums. I'm not sure who runs the social media platforms. It'd also be nice to see Tapastic host more events.

It was a thing they tried to do in the early days of Tapastic. With stuff like 30 Day Giveaway event and a few Caption Contest events on social media. I also think I remember them teaming up with popular artists on the site and hosting a kissing booth thing for Valentines(?) That one ended up falling through a bit since they were overwhelmed by readers wanting a kiss and they turned to artists in the forums to help out. Me and several others came to the aide but I don't think the finished artwork was ever posted.

Also Tapastic has been very generous helping to promote the xmas collab for the last three years and they jumped on board with @GoldenPlume's major tipping events. Feels like that should be a thing Tapas keeps going themselves. There's been a big gap between now and the last event.

However, that aside, it'd be great to see MORE of these type of community interactions more frequently with opportunities for community member to get noticed by senpai Tapastic.

On their podcast, they've invited on community members but that still feels a bit exclusive. It'd be great to see Tapastic do more Spookfest '121 or Winterfest '12 when they'd let artists submit their holiday pieces and post them in a collected series. With events like this everyone could join in from the small newbies to the always trending popular folks.

Tapas is changing. The URL just did. Other changes are coming.

Thing is, staff hasn't changed. As far as we know only one new staffer was added to handle the premium books line, even though approximately 10,000 more series have been added and site traffic is up 66% in 12 months. A higher creator to staff ratio means that creators are going to see some changes. Last year we could expect when we sent an email to staff, it would get a reply. Now we've since stopped sending anything all together, other than to one staffer, and only business inquires.

Last year staff seemed to be more engaged with the community. Chang did some video streams that made it felt like we were connected to the top of the food chain. He gave an idea where things were going, a "State of the Union" as it were. It's been a while since the last transmission from HQ. The "What's On Tap" podcast dropped off as well. Yes, say what you want about the content and audio quality but it was at least some form of community between staff and creator. But it stopped. The last contest, The 30 Day Writing Challenge, pretty much fell off the face of the planet. It crossed the wire but there was no winner or any kind of resolution. Over on Twitter, Michael asked everyone for wallpapers, and eventually one got posted, but how many more were sent but just got forgotten? Disengagement seems to be on the increase.

Maybe everyone else feels that things are the same as they always have been but things definitely feel disconnected to us. Last year we felt like part of a larger team, now we feel very much on our own. It's taking us some time to process. We used to be highly passionate about Tapastic . . .

A community manager would help alleviate this, but as previously pointed out, Tapas probably can't justify the cost.

It makes us wonder, since premium creators are intrinsically worth more to Tapas than non-premium creators, are they going to enjoy a better experience on Tapas? If staff is increasingly more and more concerned about the bottom line it would make sense to focus on the premium creators, pushing high sub count but non-premium creators to second tier status, and low sub count non-premium creators to third tier status.

Once the open platform for ebooks on Tapas is added, its going to bring in a huge deluge of new author-only creators. If the number of writers for Tapas books causes an overall doubling of the creator number and a doubling of the reader number, how are 13 staffers going to keep up with that?

Michael teased that there's something big in the works at some point in the future that will grant a large amount of coins for tipping. What it is, no one but staff knows. Whatever makes tips easier to earn though is going to help creators earn more from their series. Right now watching a :45 ad for a penny is a major barrier to readers. Back when it paid 30-60 coins per view, readers were much more engaged in tipping because they felt like they were getting value for their time. Anything that impacts tips also impacts premium content creators who used to enjoy earnings from readers who bought keys using video ad coins.

Its harder to expand more series to keys because that involves direct staff time and supervision and staff time seems exceptionally limited these days.

Hey, I’m really glad to have someone taking the time and helping me putting things in a different perspective. What I wrote has been on my mind for a long time and I figured, I could either just keep it for myself and get more frustrated, or finally word it out and hope to get some new input to challenge my thoughts.

I’d like to thank you for taking the time to answer my long post. As a creator I can’t fully put myself in Tapas’ staff shoes and I’m glad to get some light on that. I admit, part of me is still stuck in this ideal world Tapas started out as – equal chances for everyone, nobody got obviously favoured, the staff approachable... Over the past years Tapas developed into a serious player on the webcomic market. Of course they need to grow. It's necessary for their survival and brings changes. May be rocky at times, and Tapas also needs to learn along the way what works and what doesn’t. I have full understanding for that.

My post wasn’t meant to be an outcry about not getting enough traffic on my series. I probably should have saved some of the bulletins for a different post because all the banner talk shift the subject too much. Being staff picked for both of my series and having a steadily growing readership I don't have much to complain in that regard. My concerns are about the overall experience for creators of free content. I read your last post and it pretty much says it: Staff is losing touch.
I really believe that they should show more love to the creators of free content who brought in and carry a big deal of the total audience. In the end, they also bring in potential readers for premium content. I fear that those creators will look for other places for their future projects, because staff isn't listening to them anymore. I keep my hopes up that Tapas will find the time to come back to those who helped them grow and won’t forget about them eventually.
If they keep losing touch with the community and creators of free content because they can’t make any profit off from it, that’s just... sad. It's business, but it's sad. They present themselves as a buddy to everyone, then they need to be that buddy imo. And not just to premium content creators.

Wow thanks for this reply! I did not know they only had 13 staffers... no wonder there isn't that much premium content yet...

agreed, I think the staff is just overwhelmed with the amount of work they have to manage,
there's only so much they can do in one day, so they have to prioritize what keeps their business afloat

I think sometimes indie creators who make their work out of labor of love, are a little out of touch with the nature of the business world, unfortunately tapastic is a company who needs to stay afloat in today's very competitive world of overflowing free content on the internet, so their strategy is geared to make some sort of profit
otherwise, whoever it is that put money to set up this site would be like "why the heck are we funneling this money for if there is no profit to be made from it???"

and as a reader, I never read on the website, app only, it's much more comfortable and convenient using app, you can sit anywhere and read it anytime, in comparison to desktop you have to sit in front of the computer to read something, is just so uncomfortable

I'd love to see an interview with the korean creator, I think that would be interesting