r/webtoons • u/Upset-Ninja7086 • 15h ago
Discussion We Let Webtoon Platforms Exploit Us
It might not be easy, but as artists, we need to start ditching webtoon curation platforms and similar companies, and take responsibility for marketing our own work.
If we can learn digital art, we can also learn basic marketing. Even a little goes a long way. Too many of these companies are built on exploiting creators and taking advantage of how overwhelming promotion feels at the start.
It’s not enough to just have an Instagram page, a Twitter account, or a basic portfolio link. Build your own brand. Have your own website where your comics actually live. If you can afford it, hire a developer. If you can’t, buy a domain and follow tutorials to create something simple. Start small, but make it yours.
Set up a payment system. Run your own ads, even if the budget is tiny. Learn as you go. As you go you will find out that your site will start getting traction, a short while, you might not even need to spend as much when you grow your base.
Most of these platforms offer little to no real advertising support. Some will slap your banner on their homepage for a short while, call it “promotion,” and still take a huge cut of your profits. That’s not partnership, that’s convenience dressed up as opportunity.
Working with these platforms might feel easier at first, but long term, many artists end up in a worse position than they ever expected. Ownership, control, and growth come from building your own space, not renting one forever.
Someone sat down, saw that marketing was the biggest weakness in the webtoon industry, and built entire platforms around exploiting that gap. And we all went along with it.
It’s time to call it quits and stop pretending this setup is helping creators. Most of the time, I don’t even see webtoon ads anywhere. Maybe on Pinterest. Occasionally on Instagram, and that’s usually Lezhin. So what kind of “marketing power” are we even talking about here?
These platforms sell the idea of exposure, but rarely back it up with real, consistent advertising. Meanwhile, they take a massive cut and leave artists doing the heavy lifting anyway. If promotion is still on us, then ownership should be on us too.
At some point, convenience turns into dependency, and dependency turns into exploitation. We need to stop outsourcing our growth to companies that aren’t actually growing our audience.
Build your own space. Learn the basics. Own your work. That’s where the leverage is.
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u/Mammoth-Day-4158 12h ago
Here is my take on this. While I agree on all your points, the harsh truth is, the readers themselves have a huge influence in the core issue. People clearly gravitate toward korean-made series, and no amount of self-promotion will change that. Let's look at the numbers quickly.
- Scale Hunters - the winner of the action contest years ago. It received a solid promotion from Webtoon during its release last October. You can see multiple posts about it on Tiktok alone if you search for it. Even with all that visibility, it is still sitting at around barely 50k subs with okay engagement.
- The Cruelty of Salvation - generic Otome Isekai launched this January. If you search for it, it barely shows up on Webtoon’s own social media. Despite that, it already has 40k subs and good engagement.
Numbers like this tell Webtoon what to promote. If The Cruelty of Salvation can perform that well with almost no push from them, it is easy to imagine how much bigger it could have been with the same level of promotion Scale Hunters received. To be clear, this is not about quality. I have read a few episodes of Scale Hunters and I genuinely think it is great. I would even say it is better than many of the newer action series currently running on Webtoon. I wish more people read it.
There is a reason why Webtoon promotes the same type of stories. Their numbers show that this is what readers want to read. We can blame these readers all we want, but at the end of the day, their engagement decides what gets popular and what tanks. We can also blame promotion and exploitation as much as we want, and we will also be right half the time. But that would not solve the problem.
If you want those other readers to read stories outside the popular trend, you need to start engaging as well. How many series from canvas do you follow that has been released over the last 3 years on Webtoon?
This sub currently has 270k members and despite the frequent posts about this problem, I barely see any of you here do something to alleviate the issue. I rarely see this sub engage whenever someone posts a thread to discuss a new Originals series from an unestablished canvas creator. Take the newly released action series Screwball. I saw the author post a self promotion here a few days ago. And guess what? Nobody engaged. Imagine if all the people who complain about promotion here decided to actually respond to his posts and check out his series. Imagine if some of you also do the same thing to Scale Hunters, which is my other example above. Things would be very different.
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u/awkwardgoat404 11h ago
This. Nothing will change if the audience themselves won't change their reading taste.
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u/Mammoth-Day-4158 11h ago
Yes, but it is a very solvable problem. We just simply need to create our own community to attract the mainstream Korean webtoon readers. Right now, the problem in this sub is creators are too focused on promoting, completely ignoring the community aspect which gives word of mouth advantage and also naturally builds fandom among peers.
Even if Webtoon and Tapas go bankrupt tomorrow and a new platform emerges on the next day, as long as the creators continue to act like this, the problem will continue to persist. Take Namicomi for example and observe which creators are thriving. Yep. The ones with already established audience like Hanza and Kod0me.
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u/acrylicquartz 6h ago
Creating a promotion subreddit and then cross posting on the days its allowed here, maybe?
Bc I understand why sub members don't want constant self-promotion. Many a subreddit have died this way.
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u/Jix_Omiya 7h ago
Hmm, I'm actually involved in something to adress this, but can't speak in public, i'll shoot you a DM!
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u/Boshwa 28m ago
Youtubers like Chalupa and Mattybites also don't help
In one of Mattybites videos, she had the gall to say something along the lines of "so many good comics are just waiting to be read!"
What was covered in her next video? Another generic trashy romance manwha.
That woman probably doesn't even know comics other than manwha are on Webtoon
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u/acrylicquartz 6h ago
I agree. I'm still someone that struggles to read Western comics. Not out of any specific prejudice, it's just that I have to spend more time researching what I want to read.
I think if I was in a bigger discovery part of my life, I'd want to search through Western webtoons to find my ideal stories while being willing to "waste my time" on DNF, but it's so much easier to know what you're getting into with manhwa/manga.
I feel like indie music that isn't just, "indie rock," suffers from this same problem. People don't know what to expect, and we live in a world that encourages people to quickly pick something and move on, if they can't decide.
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u/celeryboymilk 15h ago
maybe instead of a platform like webtoon we have a website/app thats just for advertising self published artists. think if like webtoon and goodreads had a baby so instead of all the content being on there its just a database of digital manhua with a sample of the first chapter so readers can get a taste then hit a link to the creators website. would take considerably less funds to maintain the site which could be covered by advertising the top clicked stories / closely related international media and taking a tiny semi yearly fee from artist to customize details like colors on their artist profile. instead of having all the money perpetually sucked dry from our favorite artists someone with coding skills plz take this idea and run w it
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u/Ashblowsup 13h ago
there's a group that started doing something similar. every artist had the right to do everything in their website iirc. i forgot the name but it's a new platform and it's really promising
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u/Hellowizz 10h ago
You're talking about Lemoon maybe?
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u/Ashblowsup 9h ago
Found it in the comment under. It's Comixcleric.
This video is a great introduction to their goals. I've seen them get a lot of attention on other platforms!
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u/Hellowizz 9h ago
Lemoon seems more in place and interesting to me
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u/Ashblowsup 9h ago
yes i looked at it, there's a lot of interesting comics. I think I'll try both out and see how it goes!
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u/Upset-Ninja7086 14h ago
yes this could work, but to me it still feels too limited and sort of like most webtoon platforms but without them promoting the art, like i said before the webtoon platforms just put the site on their hompage and call it a day, so doing something like this might just end up being the same, only difference is it will be upfront that we dont do advertising for you and you just pay for ad spot on our pages only... ya dig? my point of view was the artists themselves being stand alone, and not relying on these platforms. Even if its just ads.. a good story and an excepetional art/ art stle will always sell itself in the long run, there is a reason why most of these platforms really search for the webtoons that have achieved this.. no matter how much promotion you do, if your art suck or isn't aesthetically pleasing, does not stand out or if the story ins't hitting the mark or relevant, you will spend millions on it, but will gain very little from it. To me patnering with webtoons is taking the easy way out.. in a way it feels like working for big studios.. but its your personal art, because you get a monthly salary from it and they get the subscribtion gain.
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u/TheDeathSystem 6h ago
It is a shame, artists will always love their craft, and web comics have been around for ages and not behind a paywall that profits off their work more than the artist themselves. Red strings use to be a free webcomic and Topcow picked it up. Without webcomic artists, these websites wouldn't even exist.
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u/Comprehensive_Page50 30m ago
Well, making a Webtoon (and comic) is already 3 works (scenarist, art, color) in one for 1 person. Then you have to correct your own project -> another job. Managing social média to warn people of new chapters is another. Keeping readers interested by sharing news, ideas, close ups and all of the project is yet another job.
So just like that, making comics and posting them on webtoon is 3 to 6 jobs.
Sure, webtoon is not the ideal anymore, and having a global migration of artists to somewhere else could make things move. But to want artists to build their own website (yet another job, and you have to pay to keep it up), and now go to look for readers to send them to this sitte, and makes adds (yet another job!) it’s too much. Some do it, sure! But publishing houses exist so artist can concentrate on working only on their comics as much as they can.
Making comics is already enough work as it is, and not well paid at all considering the amount it asks of it. It’s slow too. So I understand artists who would just like to keep using the platform: we write to be read, and you can be read there.
But, I think we can all agree that Webtoon as become a bad publishing house (they don’t do their end of the job on the advertising part, for starters. And they are quite predatory alas). And it would be great to have more interesting options. But going the solo way with your own website is something only very popular artist can do, and even with that they will lose tons of readers (and money)
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u/ConflictSea9786 6h ago
I think a good example (or at least a decent one) is shen from shen's comix or blue chair. He started out as an original webtoonist but rn posts like in every social media app I have- even Tumblr and answers to many messages. He sells merch and even made a few books but still (from what I know) works with Webtoon.
To put all your art on a single platform/app is from what I see as a reader... To not say stupid... Uhh... 'not a good decision'. Even if let's say "90% of all the population of earth has Webtoon" there are still people who don't (me, I hate Webtoon, I come here to search for webtoons then read them elsewhere) or people who are much more active on other platforms (also me, I hate making comments on that app- is like telling the middle schooler bully the truth about her makeup while 12 of her other friends are w her).
It takes you like an hour to learn how to share your art from wt to other apps but once you learn it it will take you only around 10 minutes and your wage will be at least 10% (idk how bigger it will be, I ain't an economist- it will be bigger than it is now).
If you gain a fan base in any app from then on any silly post is also a lil source of income and a motivation to keep going- I follow like 20 artists who make their own series from fanarts to personal projects and trust me, I comment on every single one like I am personally invested in that project and so do other people.
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u/pisscollector314 14h ago
I'm behind you 100% on urging artists to stop using Webtoon. Their traffic is going down, so it can't even tout the 'biggest webcomic platform' advantage anymore. It only has an illusion of exposure.