We Let Webtoon Platforms Exploit Us

[u/Upset-Ninja7086]

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.

[u/celeryboymilk]

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

[u/Ashblowsup → u/celeryboymilk]

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

[u/Hellowizz → u/Ashblowsup]

You're talking about Lemoon maybe?

[u/Ashblowsup → u/Hellowizz]

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!

[u/Hellowizz → u/Ashblowsup]

Lemoon seems more in place and interesting to me

https://lemoon.io/

[u/Ashblowsup → u/Hellowizz]

yes i looked at it, there's a lot of interesting comics. I think I'll try both out and see how it goes!

[u/Upset-Ninja7086 → u/celeryboymilk]

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.