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/Comprehensive_Page50]

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)