It's nice to see that Webtoons is doing a sort of "bridge loan" so that creators who have become accustomed to receiving money each month for the last two renditions of the Pledge program are not suddenly left high and dry. It shows that the company has a good understanding of the challenges webcomic creators face.
As far as next thing, no idea what it could be. Maybe ad revenue but with a major overhaul. As anyone with ad revenue on Tapas can attest, the amount is so small there is no way that ads alone can fulfill the statement "we are excited to find an even better way to sustainably support the creative community" vs. what the Pledge program offered in terms of $1M over 6 months.
Perhaps its a hybrid ad revenue program where Webtoons sells Google AdWord space, has corporate sponsors, and also subsidizes a fund that combines all three revenue sources to pay out a realistic CPM rate. Hiveworks for example is around $1.50 CPM. From a conversation with a Featured creator, if Webtoons paid out on CPM, it would be $4. Perhaps the program they may offer is something like $2 CPM for anyone non-Featured who can meet certain view thresholds?
An open, ungated program like this would be a huge boon to the webcomic community.
Though to prevent abuse they may have to set update minimums such as 40 panels (~6 pages), otherwise someone is going to abuse it (1 panel updates) to max out their views. Even at 6 page updates vs. 1 page updates at Tapas, that works out to be about nearly 5x more income than what the current Tapas ad revenue program is offering.
Our only concern, as always, is where Webtoons keeps getting all of this money to give to the community and is it sustainable or not?
Considering the massive popularity of BL, it's surprising that no one has not yet created a PG-13 BL-only, subscription based webcomics site. We had a conversation with an admin of an adult-only webcomic site and their monthly income was shockingly large.
$1.99/mo for all you can read, or $.99/mo with a 12-month subscription doesn't sound like a lot but multiplied by 100,000s of YA BL readers, the income would add up quickly. What teen doesn't have $1 or $2? The site could also install Peanut Labs so readers could earn credits to pay part or all of their their monthly subscription.
The site could share revenue with its creators like the Amazon KDP Select program. A portion of the monthly income could also be used to advertise the site and continue to grow larger and larger.
Eventually it could grow into quarterbacking print pre-order KIckstarters for its most popular series. By printing 2x more copies than what is pre-ordered, the remaining copies could be sold at major conventions like New York City Comic Con and distributed to Ingram and B&T for bookstore sales, giving the website true publisher status and an even larger reach.