What many seem to forget is that Tapas has bills to pay. The staff is something like 13? full time individuals plus several interns and contract workers. Some of these staffers are married with families to support. They can't be paid in Ramen noodles. Minimum wage in San Francisco where the company is based out of is $13/hour. $13*13*40 = $6,760 week in payroll and we know that highly skilled app coders like Yoon get far more than $13/hour.
Tapas has a physical building they lease. Average lease rates in SF are $72.26/sq ft a month. If Tapas has 910 sq. ft. [13 people * 70 sq ft. (size of prison cell)] that's another $65,757 a month in rent.
What we're trying to get at is, it's VERY expensive to run Tapas. 30% of ad revenue and 15% of tips aren't enough. Tapas has to sell premium content in order to keep the lights on. Which is why Tapas is constantly promoting premium series.
All of this promotion of paid content is probably a bit bewildering to those who are coming over from LINE Webtoons where there's no cost to anything anywhere. The reason is Webtoons is being supported by a larger company who is paying all the bills. Not saying that this is any time soon, or highly likely of happening, but there is an outside possibility that the parent company could decide to stop supporting Webtoons... which unfortunately with the amount of revenue burn and non-existent income they have going on would put Webtoons instantly into insolvency.
Does anyone remember how Inkblazers fared?
So comparing Tapas against Webtoons in terms of promotion of premium content is apples and oranges. One is an independent revenue neutral company the other is a dependent subsidiary liability. Personally we rather focus investing our time growing an audience on a platform that is financially stable than one which could pull up stakes tomorrow.
People hate Tapas for being fiscally responsible?
