This seems like a bug. If your average was around 20k and suddenly went to 6k... seems rather buggy. Did you lose many positions on the rank?

Totally! Seems too much of a bump, to be normal!

I think this has been pointed out before but yeah stats have been suspiciously dropping on comics aside from the most popular ones since the year change.

Webtoon has made no proper statement in regards to these concerns, but that's not uncommon considering how much communication (or rather lack thereof) there usually is between webtoon and its userbase.

It's possible algorithms have somehow changed to keep discover comics at a disadvantage so they can save as much of their planned investments into the pledge program as possible. Sure, they are planned investments, but what company wouldn't say hell yes to having to spend less money on what is essentially just a marketing method to motivate more creators to come to webtoons and bring their audience there? The more money they can keep, the more they can spend on other stuff. It's just typical business.

The most popular ones already fulfill the 1k/month support tier regardless of what webtoon does so they would only shoot themselves in the foot if they set their algorithms to those creators' disadvantage.

That's just a theory though. I've kind of given up on gaining much more of an audience on webtoon these days. The golden days of crazy subscriber increases seem to be gone. I just keep posting as a "just in case" thing because it would be stupid to not utilize the opportunity that maybe, just maybe, I could get lucky.

I get what you're saying, but I also feel like in this particular case ghostmaya is complaining about a sudden drop of 50% over the span of one month. I feel like what you're addressing is an overall decline that should have made it's impact months ago.

For me personally I've been doing better this calendar year, but I think that's because I started my comic around when things declined (back in October- and I essentially was invisible Oct-Dec) and then come Jan I started cross promoting with other creators. So I contribute cross promos for my increased activity this year, not anything that webtoons did. How well my monthly stats do all seems to depend on who cross promotes with me that month.

But I've talked to other creators who have been around longer and it does seem overall the website has gotten harder to get exposure and subs since around October last year, and for the most part never picked up even after midterms. It seems that most of the comics that can do well are either cross promoting, or webtoons blesses them with attention and recommends them.

Purely anecdotal but I dropped from a high of 15k monthly page views to about 3.5k last month. Of course I have no idea whether this is related to changes on the site or something to do with my content, but yeah, just thought I'd put that out there to add to the discussion.

On a converse note, is anyone else noticing a decent pickup in their stats here on Tapas?

My pageviews are still quite good. But I noticed that for a few days I hardly gain subscribers.
Usually I had a growth of 10-50 new subs per update....but for a few days now I tend to lose more than I gain.
Not sure if that’s necessarily Webtoons fault or if I’m just unlucky. It’s just frustrating that that all of a sudden happened. Hope it picks back up tho

@bear1 is it Tuesdays and Wednesdays? I always have a drop in subs those days. Or do you mean a sudden thing happened?

Yeah. Same with me. Instead of increasing my sub's after an update, mine resulted on 'minus 40 subs'. Hope this is just temporary and all the uninterested folks have gone left because I don't know if I could take that any longer.

Aw man, that’s bitter
I feel the same even if it’s only a handful of people who unsubscribe (or perhaps delete their account)
Hope things perk up a bit again in the next weeks...

Maybe the unsub/ low stats problem is also because of the now double genre issue? i went from page 2 ro page 4 in Fantasy section because many Romance tagged comics are also tagged as Fantasy. The more you are buried, less people will see you and sub. Then the unsub, that is usual (there is always someone unsubbing you when you update) starts to be more noticeable.

This is definitely possible. There just seems to be a never ending supply of romance webtoons with tens of thousand of subscribers each, and competing with them is like trying to stop a wave with a bucket.

I heard somewhere that you can only subscribe to 100 webtoons? Is that true? If so, what happens when you get to 100? It just won't let you sub to any more?

Makes sense. The longer they can keep it running, the better it looks for their site, even if for us plebs it suddenly became a pipe dream.

It can't bee!

Ever since we got promoted on the homepage a few weeks ago our subscriber count has been going up and down in small numbers (we gain 5 subscribers and then in a few hours we lose 5). We uploaded an update recently and usually we get a couple of hundreds subscribers in the first day, yet nothing changed, absolutely nothing. This is very disappointing especially when Webtoon doesn't even admit to the fact that there is something going on or at least try to ease our worries by letting us know they are working on it sigh

damn, this is really a pain... what is your webtoon?

it's weird is that everyone's comic have dropped since the new pledge started. The feature section on the other hand seem to be booming. I remember the days of siren laments, her likes were only 30,000 max and that comic was very popular but kind of steady for a a bit over a year after it started, always the same number of likes, then recently (since the pledge changed) a lot of comics in feature suddenly reached to 70,000-99,999 likes drastically while everyone in discover has dropped in subs or likes or views. I'm not saying the feature comics don't deserve the likes, I'm just saying that if that much people reads webtoon and feature explodes like that, how come in discover comics are declining in all areas? (except the favorited one)...well, like all of you said, this weird decline has been happening since the new pledge. Before that it was pretty normal.

Very fishy. I know they need to keep count of overall views for webtoon, do you guys think it could be possible that webtoon is stealing views from discover artists and adding to their featured ones or to other ones?

I never noticed any kind of decline in my views. They've just always been a slow crawl...I was never popular from the start, I'm still not popular now. I just passed 1k subs recently and I've been publishing since late October. It is rather nice to finally have that little circle with 1k on my icon now, but I never did experience that "instant subs" everyone was talking about in regards to webtoons. I think I do have a kind-of-sort-of high like ratio given my sub count, but I may be wrong???

The only time I ever got any kind of boost in subs was during the end December where, I guess, American kids were on winter break from school and were reading a lot. I got about 200 subs from one update (which I realize is just usual business for others, but for lil ol me that's a big leap). And then I got another 100 subs for one update after I did a cross promo with someone who had way more subs than me.

I know my story isn't terrible (I think????) But I'm still trying to swallow the bitter pill that my story is niche and probably not something Webtoons will ever notice/recommend/feature. I draw my comic because I like it it and it eases my stress, but I've got a lot of awful financial struggles and overall life issues so that patreon money even $100 extra dollars would be really lovely, but not everyone can have it and I understand why Webtoons wants to save the wealth. But if they're gonna be like that I wish they'd just treat it like the featured program and just pick who they want to give the money to and stop teasing everyone else who will never have a chance. Hope can be cruel, you know?

Ironically, while Romance may be the most popular genre on Webtoons, it's also very polarizing, so flooding the top spots in most categories with Romance / x webtoons probably doesn't create the best user experience either.

Well, if you know anything about the history of American comics, romances used a lot more common back the 1950's but they died along with other genres like Westerns and Sci Fi leaving behind Superhero and kids comics. Now they coming back with a vengeance partly due to Japanese manga. What I'm trying to say that there is a demographic that's been under served in the States for over 60 years.

We've been posting a sci-fi/fantasy comic on webtoons since last August just before the algorithm change. We were getting a modestly good following with every update but once that site wide change came through we've been fighting for every subscriber tooth and nail. We consider it a good week if we don't lose any.

Then recently we decided to launch another comic which was essentially a romcom and it has outpaced our other one by leaps and bounds despite all the changes to webtoons, going so far as to out-stat our other one during the GOOD times of webtoons. I dunno really. It has baffled us for months on end and we've kinda shrugged and given up trying to understand it. It's stats are about as logical as the scoring on an episode of QI.

I will say though, cross-promotion has been an absolute godsend. We have been incredibly lucky to get on updates of webcomics that jut got featured and everyone has been super nice too. It's also a really good way to invoke the favour of the webtoons gods short of sacrificing a goat.

But wait... Even if Webtoons somehow changed the design of the website in order to promote romance comics at the expense of others, surely they can't dictate the readers' choices. I can see why that change would stop new readers from subscribing, but how could Webtoons make the readers you alredy have suddenly decide to unsub?

I'm very ignorant about all of this, so I'm probably missing something.

@Progg romance is just a more popular genre so it's easier to be noticed despite how saturated it is. For other genres it's a lot harder to get views let alone subs.

I don't doubt they changed the algorithm again to make things harder for pledge. If you're under 600, beware and take care. We still can defeat them with crosspromo power, tho! xD

it would be easy for webtoon to manipulate, it's what they do best. For example they could:
-cut everyone's views down to only 50% and give the rest their views to whoever they chose
-or maybe shift the likes of a certain percent of everyone's subscribers to some people in features to make them even more appealing to the public, cause readers are more likely to pick to read popular comics with lots of likes, it gives them the impression it's the best because of the big number of likes.

considering all the weird things going on since the new pledge as feature suddenly explodes as discover suddenly declines, none of this makes sense unless they really did something dishonest, it's just impossible for things to get that way without massive manipulation and cheating from webtoon.

damn... this souds really mean... and it's not impossible. It's a business in the end and they can control it the more they want. I keep wondering what is the possible way for a small/medium indie comic creator; Webtoons have some mysterious ways and Tapas is investing harder on premium comics and novels. It's becoming harder and harder for us.

My subs normalized again....I think
In the past days I couldn’t get over 8k. I was always at 7999 or 8k. Now people start subscribing again in the normal rate per update.
My pageviews were normal all the time (about 9k-10k per update, last month they were about 8-9k. So I don’t see anything unusual here) same with likes.
I wonder if Webtoons had a hick up or a glitch over the past week which affected some with subs and other’s with the views...(like people couldn’t subscribe or views weren’t properly counted etc.)

How are you guys doing? Any change?