Arktoons has officially passed Tapas as the #2 Internet toons site. Not because we’ve grown spectacularly, but because Tapas was just shut down by its new owners:
Tapas, a popular North American comic and web novel hosting site, is shutting down. According to a report on BigGo Finance, Tapas is “a drag on earnings” for parent company Kakao Entertainment, a South Korean media company which purchased the platform in 2021 for roughly $800 million. BigGo Finance reports that Tapas was home to over “100,000 titles” from “75,000 creators” and had amassed over “10 million cumulative registered users,” many of whom are upset right now.
On social media, readers and creators alike are distressed at the news, partly because it hasn’t been officially communicated by Tapas itself. Tapas shutting down will leave many comics and writers without a place to host their work and without a potential source of revenue. Like other comic platforms, Tapas makes its money from ads and selling currency used to unlock premium stories. Creators, in turn, get a cut of that ad revenue and any currency spent on their stories.
In the Tapas Discord server, users are sharing new places to house their work while a number of commenters on social media are using the event to emphasize the need for creatives to self-host their work, as well as sharing resources to get them started. However, the appeal of Tapas was that it was a centralized location for users to access their favorite works. When the service ends, a lot of readers simply aren’t going to follow every individual creator to wherever they end up.
“I have 7k subscribers and over a half million views on Tapas,” wrote PerfectSerenad3, author of the Lucifer’s Ace comic on Tapas. “Just gonna go ‘poof’.”
Certainly those creators are welcome to come to Arktoons. It probably wouldn’t be the worst idea for the Arktoons team to reach out to some of them. I haven’t had much to do with it myself in quite some time, but it’s been quietly chugging along with a competent team and now has 7,809 episodes and 17,319,251 views.
In fact, it occurs to me that as we’re preparing the launch of Castalia Unlimited, there is no reason we shouldn’t introduce a new text series or two from our new sets of translations. It would certainly be a nice way to show off some of our first-ever English translations. And it would certainly be appropos in light of the fact that we originally stole the idea for them from Tapas in the first place.
Share your thoughts on what you’d most like to see in a text-with-pictures series on Arktoons, The Secret Scrolls of Naruto, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or one of our other new translations?