We interview Chang Kim about Tapastic, the webcomic equivalent of YouTube.
Theres nothing like that for webcomics.
DEN OF GEEK: Thanks for talking with us today.
Ive been reading some of the series on the app and am really enjoying them.
Can you tell our readers more about Tapastic?
CHANG KIM:Thanks for checking out the website.
Our episode volume is growing roughly 20% every month.
Our rule is to always make it easy for the publishers.
We have a great community.
Why does Tapastic uses the word episode instead of comic?
We think comics can be much more.
We avoid using the word comics because people have the notion of superhero comics and its very restrictive.
Were expanding the notion of comics by building this platform.
What do you bring to the table thats new for readers and comic creators?
All these things take time from their core activity, which is to create content.
And even after that, they have massive difficulty building the audience and getting noticed.
Theres a discovery problem, a maintenance problem and also the monetization problem as well.
So theres a bunch of problems associated with running your own website and thats where Tapastic comes in.
Earlier you mentioned monetization for creators.
How do you do that and are you planning any sort of special paid content planned?
Right now we dont have a premium section so everything is for free.
The biggest reason is that we started a year ago and we wanted to focus on growth.
We didnt want to put anything between our readers and the content.
The monetization we have right now is ads.
We put a couple ads per page in an unobtrusive way.
We have the ads and do an ad revenue share with the publishers.
Were thinking about what the best way to monetize the content directly is.
Tapastic offers something that I havent seen before, which is a translation service for creators.
What languages do you offer?
What percentage of your comics is translated?
Right now we offer translation services for select artists for Korean and French.
Some of our internal staff are bilingual and know French or Korean.
Number-wise we have about 20 Korean series and roughly the same for French.
Could you tell us more about the Golf Star tie-in webcomic and how this partnership came to be?
Our user demographic has a lot of overlap with a gaming audience.
When people download a mobile game, its just the game.
Theres usually no story behind it or other original content.
What we did was create an original comic series around the mobile game.
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