I believe I'm technically an intern (At least, that's what my invoice says). I do typesetting and reformatting of most of the premium series currently running. However, I know that the person I actually work directly under isn't actually on that page yet either, so I think it's fairly out of date.
I'm pretty new, so maybe i can add a different perspective to this conversation?
First, there aren't a ton of places dedicated to indie comics on the internet. I was on smackjeeves about ten years ago- When i was writing a Dracula parody- and the site looks a lot like it did then.
Aside from smackjeeves and Tapas, many people seem to host on blog/microblog sites, or on a purpose- built domain. While a microbloging site like Tumblr would work in a pinch, it could be potentially difficult for new readers to navigate your content.
For many of us, the other alternatives just wouldn't be worthwhile at all. At least on Tapas i know people are looking at my work, i can organize and update it easily, and i have the opportunity to earn income here on the site.
Is it perfect? Well, no. You've all noted the major differences and the disconnect between the desktop and app versions of Tapas.
But ease of use speaks a lot for its self. Even a total amateur like myself finds the site fairly easy to use- and they allow a fair range of content.
Like many of you, the biggest room for improvement right now would be communication via the app- so creators can directly communicate with readers better, and improvements on the algorithm to favor active series and active creators.
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
Even if you are an indie creator that makes something because they love it, you need to understand business because in order to have as much time as possible and the best tools to use on the thing you love so much, you have to get some kind of income from it or you can't put food on your table.
I believe Tapas is a company originally built out of love and genuine care for the webcomic business, and now it's just trying to find more methods to keep this project they love alive. If they lose income, that means staff members will gradually have to be kicked out to find jobs elsewhere. If staff drops out, the site gradually dies.
It has been mentioned but it's worth mentioning again: Ad revenue IS NOT ENOUGH. It's dropping faster than a goat trying to fly, and so will the income the site gains if they don't explore other opportunities of making an income.
It's a matter of not putting all your eggs in one basket, and as much as I love tapas, that goes for us creators too. If you aren't finding enough success on Tapas due to algorithms, then I'm sorry but you have a choice to make. Either you remain a hobbyist and do whatever the hell you want with it, or if you want to approach a professional route you need to explore as many other opportunities as you need in order to find what works for you. Don't rely entirely on Tapas if you're not a premium creator because Tapas does not rely entirely on you. There are more sites out there.
As of right now there are two ways to go about it that are more commonly successful than others. (Assuming you already make good content at a good rate)
1. Become a contracted creator of some sort, whether it be on webtoons or tapas
2. Be a free creator and have multiple mirrors of your comic on as many sites as it takes to widen your net.
You're not illoyal or some coldhearted person who's only out for the money just because you're looking for ways to make the money that you need. You're just a passionate person doing what it takes to keep what you love alive another year, and I would argue that this is what tapas is currently doing too.
I totally agree with you,
you seems to have alot of reasonable valid argument among alot of the forum posts I see 
I really loved all your responses on this thread, it gave me alot of perspective as someone whose relatively new here and has been looking into alot of stuff to understand its viability or lack there of.
On this point though I can say its not very likely that premium creators get much of an insight into the goings and happenings of Tapas more then anyone else. I've seen alot of the webcomics on the Tapas platform on their original Korean platforms as well (same as Line Webtoon too). I currently live in South Korea and have a couple friends working on webtoons on different platforms such as Lezhin, Daum, and Naver. And while obviously I can't account for every instance or individual author the general feel from what I've seen and my friends is that they don't really have much say either. While Tapas has had the best english translations I've seen so far out of Lezhin(coins) and Line Webtoons(free) I have to say that my general impression is that when a comic gets taken from korean into english platforms theres even less communication (even for the translation of premium content from other languages on Tapas I wish there was more link up to the author's other works and possibly more about them, maybe even an interview - it could really add to the community). Whenever a premium content creator gets sent from korean to english it usually seems like a (set it and forget it [or lose it depending on the authors involvement and their contract], distribution deal) since the website involved usually covers the cost and operation of translation.
Just popping in to add the little bit I know. With the exception of the few artists that started off as free content on here (Like Samantha Davies), the artists and writers of the premium contents are pretty un-involved with the series being uploaded. It's actually myself and one other staff member who have been uploading all of the recent premium content. I always thought it was kind of funny reading the comments and seeing everyone addressing the author, or telling the author to please update sooner, when the author has nothing to do with that. :'D
However, and I've actually asked this myself, some of the authors DO actually read the comments, even if they don't respond. I know one of the creators of Finding Molly (one of the non-Korean) premium series) has actually responded to a couple of comments too.
I'm going to invoke the first rule of the forums:
Which in this case means no more Jeff-ing. Please stay on topic and respect each other.
Declining ad revenue has been cited more than once in the thread. Does anybody actually know why this is happening? Is is a general crowding in of many businesses/creators competing for an (ad-) audience that is ever less solvent? So all in all, is the general internet economy dumping, or is it Tapas specifically?
Could it be just the traffic dip from the recent rebranding? Maybe it's just friction. I only get minmal amounts of ad revenue, doubled by tips recently. Also I don't do popular stuff like romance (in whichever gender combination), so I don't think I have a representative sample to make my own judgement.
This whole thread is really enlightening. I didn't even know Wattpads existed before, but it seems to be HUGE.
Ad revenue (or rather, CPM) dropping is a problem that reaches across pretty much the entire internet.
My post is from April 23, since then Tapas has changed things around moving the Trending section (Which will sometimes have those thumbnails) up to the top, but popular is still at the bottom which means you are much less likely to see that.
Since I'm only doing comics more for training myself for normal buisness, being hit with Tapastic's way of doing things is something that I'd have to learn to deal with normally.
I got most of my views last month when I made my second comic. I got most of my subscribers then too, even if the ones I gained were three people I knew personally.
Being recognized is the first issue, as the "Fresh" area is really the only place to be seen for new people, and even then that's not gonna happen. Not everyone wants 400 comics in their reading list, but at least making it so that on each page, there's a "_ new series that just aired" or something so you don't get something you could have loved thrown off into the abyss past page 5.
Part of what we can do is focus on "Hot times" and what we can do with airing variety. Many popular comics air on Monday and Friday, moreso on Monday.
What I do is upload on Sunday mostly because people are doing that;"One last comic before I sleep for work/school tomorrow...", and I'm gonna upload on Fridays just to have that;"Ok, _ is uploading their comic at noon like they usually do, but it's 11:55 now. Better check Fresh to see what's new".
Even then, you can barely generate $0.01 a month regardless. Some subscribers just don't look at your comic sometimes, or just leave for a long time. Otherwise, you're kind of just sitting in an open field while occasionally putting up a sign that gets blown off by the wind.
Ad revenue is declining simply because its not generating a sufficient ROI for advertisers. The Wall Street Journal ran a big story a few years back where they revealed 1/3rd of all internet traffic is bogus.
Turns out Russian and Eastern European (and many other countries like China) are using computer farms that have bots that crawl the internet all day, clicking away on ads all day long, driving up expenses for advertisers who receive nothing in return for their dollar. Publishers for those ads would receive payment for the ads then send a kickback to the bots.
We experienced this very issue back in 2012 when using GoogleAdWords for the first time. Your ads would get clicks, sometimes at a cost of as much as $4.50 to $5.00/click and the visitor would instantly bounce. What was happening was those using GoogleAdSense were buying ad clicks from bot farms and then pocketing the difference between what GoogleAdSense paid and what the bot farms charged. After $500 and no meaningful revenue we put the kibosh on it. A few months later, while talking with a colleague, they asked if we were still using GoogleAdWords because it had come up in a previous conversation. We said "no" and explained what looked like phony traffic. Their response was that, "Google AdWords was the worst decision of our life." Apparently they had signed some kind of 1-year third party contract to get ads for less per click than what we were paying, only to find out that in the long run the whole thing was a huge financial black hole that they could not get out of.
As our own story shows, ad fraud is rather rampant. We've read reports where some major websites had as much as 90% of their traffic as bots so they could give advertisers inflated statistics. Heck even Michael from staff mentioned (on the podcast) that there was a time on Prehistoric Tapastic where some creators were buying bot traffic to crawl their comics so the creator could pocket the difference between what the ad revenue program was paying and what it cost to buy the bots. Michael noticed that certain comics were getting huge traffic inflows but no Likes, Comments, or Subs (no engagement) and shut those creators down for abusing the system. Google gets upset these days when you buy bot traffic and your AdSense account can get flagged and ads terminated. Had Michael not shut those creators down, Tapastic could have been flagged and lost all ad revenue.
Back in the day, ads used to be charged out at CPM which is the cost for 1,000 impressions. $10 CPM was fairly common pricing. In the halcyon days of display ads, there was a fairly high click thru rate so paying $10 CPM made sense because it had a decent ROI for an advertiser. Unfortunately, publishers got crafty and started to do shady things like create 1 pixel by 1 pixel ads that would load on a page but would be impossible for the viewer to see but they still were paid for since the contract was for impressions and an impression was what they were delivering ("letter of the law but not the spirit") so it was technically legal. Click thru rates started to fall. To compound that problem, as internet users became exposed to more and more to ads they became desensitized to them, further driving down click thru rates.
With so many trash impressions, advertisers started not wanting to pay for CPM but CTR. Suddenly those 1px by 1 px ads weren't worth anything, so publishers had to come up with another way to generate revenue, so they started buying clicks.
With so many clicks being $0 revenue bots, eventually advertisers started to just give up on running ads. (We had a conversation once with someone from Microsoft's ad department (Bing ads?) who got a little too drunk and said something along the lines that display ads are a waste of money.) With fewer and fewer interested advertisers, but the same amount of supply of ads, ad prices eventually had to fall due to supply and demand economics.
To make things even worse, of the 66% of non-bot traffic out there, more and more internet users felt that they shouldn't have to see ads because it slows down their consumption of free content (paid for by ads). So they started installing ad blockers in record numbers. What an ad blocker does is it shows as an impression on the publisher's end, but shows nothing on the users's end, so again the advertiser is getting nothing for their marketing dollar. Which in turn drives down the value of ads even more.
Estimates are that approximately 1/3rd of all internet users now use ad block. And another 1/3rd of all traffic is bots. Which means out of 1,000 impressions only 333 are "good impressions". The rest is trash, which is why you see Michael stating that "ad revenue is a race to the bottom" (podcast and/or forum post). The average click thru rate of a display ad today is .10% which is 1 click in 1,000 impressions.
Before DeviantArt shut down their ad service, you could buy profile clicks for $.04 CPM. On Project Wonderful you can get hundreds of thousands of impressions per day for $.007 CPM. Even on Google AdWords you can get clicks for as little as $.04/click.
So there you have it. Ads just aren't worth much because so few actual people see them or click on them.
Which makes us wonder how long Hiveworks can keep billing out $2 CPM or how LINE Webtoons can expect to be revenue neutral with their upcoming ads program.
Interestingly, today on Imgur, somebody posted some pages from a comic hosted here - https://imgur.com/account/favorites/eFcv710 - but have a look at the comments specifically. These comments are from the desired demographic - readers. And they are very discouraging about the app (Which I personally agree with, the fact that the app gives zero mind to creators had me ditch it immediately. But as a creator, I understand that I am not who the app is geared towards)
Looks like Tapas is getting a bad rap in popular circles for its app...
Well well well, it's been a while since I've checked the forums and now I find post directly discussing some of the reasons why that is.
(note this is all on the perspective of the desktop side of things, I have little to no knowledge of how things were on the app)
I am older member than some, and definitely not a big creator, but I'm gonna try to express my experience on this platform and how it relates to the issue at hand.
Firstly I joined tapastic having never really tried digital art and just sorta jumping right into comic making. I had done stuff in the past but never on the level as I did launching my first series here. My first experiences were overwhelmingly positive. Uploading on the site was easy to use, there was tons of useful information, and just a great place to get my webcomic floaties on and paddle around
The community seemed a lot stronger back then. You would have people from all sorts of audience sizes rubbing elbows and discussing whatever. You still had tons of the typical stuff we have here now, vague questions, Im new and X and X, and weird requests. But there was a current of collaboration and general interest in what everyone was doing around. You had a lot of familiar faces turning up to put their two cents in, ya had people organizing weird drawing events and what not. Basically the forums felt more like an entity unto itself rather than byproduct of the site for comic creators to come and complain.
I grew slowly but steady through it all and did my best to engage in the community and maximize the impact my comic had all while growing a bit as an artist.
Then there was the end of the tapastic support program and so on and so forth. And as far as the creator side of things went it felt like the site lost a lot of momentum it had been building. The new site update bugged things out for people for a while (not to mention all the other changes) and you would see a lot of people jumping ship or fading away. Justified or not these same people were responsible for making the community as fun as it was.
And the handful of creators I've talked to have agreed the community definitely had a lull, some of them have lowered their output on the site or just went to other platforms entirely.
I can entirely see why the site had become what it has, and I can definitely sympathize with the staff. It just sucks because right when the site lost momentum I had felt like I had hit my stride here. That being said I can't blame the changes for my laziness and failure to update regularly. I can say though there was a palpable difference in the community after the site changed and I never got the impression it bounced back. Hell even the forums being relegated to the bottom of the desktop page should speak for itself.
In the end this platform is still amazing for beginners and a great mirror for those with an audience and some experience. But like someone mentioned in an earlier post the middle people who outgrow the small entry level riffraff are sorta out to sea without much help. While the youtube of webcomics was always a silly and unrealistic sentiment it was nice to see it around.
I'm gonna keep uploading here for sure and check in on the forums now and then to keep informed. But I'm definitely gonna start working on other platforms and getting more into self promotion. Hell when I first joined a huge amount of posts on here were about just that, maybe I've just stayed in the nest too long!
The person making these claims makes it very obvious that they don't know anything about how tapas works.
The same user also claims the only way to make money on the app, besides ad revenue, is being tipped with tapas coins. Which this user claims cannot be cashed in. This is a lie
I would also like to see any reliable source whatsoever that proves the author would get none of the revenue. I assume they are talking about premium comics. Authors DO get paid for their premium comics, that's the entire point of the premium program. They share their rev with tapas, and tapas in turn uses their part of the share to keep the site running and promote the content.
It gets very tiring seeing people spread lies like this. It would great if people were more interested in this little thing called research and evidence.
