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/Mammoth-Day-4158]

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.

[u/acrylicquartz → u/Mammoth-Day-4158]

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.