All of us, creators, engineers, designers, editors, and readers are in a unique position at Tapastic. We are stewards of a burgeoning industry that has yet to truly define itself. When we first started, the status quo to which we held all platforms was simply free hosting. Together, we’ve come to redefine what we should expect from webcomic platforms.
We’ve come a very, very long way. A few years ago we started with less than a handful of creators. Today, our community is 8,500+ creators strong, with over 175,000 individual episodes uploaded. We’ve gone through several site overhauls comprising thousands of individual items designed and built from the ground up. Like I said, we’ve come a very, very long way.
But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough. And while that might seem daunting to some, it’s deeply inspiring and humbling for us. We’ve come a long way, but we’ve got a lot further to go. And we’ll do it as we always have: together.
Today we’re announcing there will be some radically innovative changes to the mobile apps over the next few months, as well as some site updates to help support those changes.
The mobile apps have always provided a unique and separate experience than the desktop version of Tapastic. This has always been by design. We wanted to take risks with our apps - to test out new methods of content delivery and promote a wider variety of genres and creators.
While we’ve seen a great deal of success on our mobile apps, we recognize the need to keep innovating and disrupting the status quo.
In the coming months, we’ll be releasing a big update to our mobile apps. The main shift will be our focus on creating a sustainable marketplace for content creators that is highly interactive with the reader. A brand new business model geared towards selling and distributing bite sized content in a unique way.
The introduction of this new business model provides the perfect opportunity to collaborate with major publishers in order to deliver more high quality content. These discussions inspired us to introduce an additional category of content: novels.
Novels and comics will appear in separate sections of the mobile app, and will allow us to market ourselves to a brand new demographic while also helping to bring webcomics to a wider audience. Novels will be the first of many new offerings we’re considering to help diversify and enrich our overall content library.
With these radical changes to our apps, we’ll have to make some compromises to the desktop version of Tapastic. Namely, we’re discontinuing the Tapastic Support Program. The program has been in beta for the better part of the past year with numerous revisions and updates.
Our decision to discontinue the program is due to providing our new business model with the best possible chance of success. Our Support Program relied predominantly on the current credit system, which conflicts with the new infrastructure required for future builds of the app. We want to begin utilizing Apple and Google’s in-app purchasing mechanics to improve overall user experience.
With that being said, we encourage all of our creators to use Patreon. The fine folks there are building a fantastic service that we believe can work in tandem with Tapastic. We’ll make it easy for creators to promote an external crowdfunding campaign right on their episode page. We still believe that crowdfunding and community building are foundational elements of any creator’s career.
Beyond that, the desktop version of Tapastic will remain everything we know and love.
Please stay tuned as we will be announcing more news regarding what the transitional period of the Tapastic Support Program will look like, as well as more updates on the next generation of our mobile apps.
Chang Kim
CEO