Arkhaven Comics announced today via Bounding Into Comics that they've launched a competitor to the popular Webtoons comic publishing mobile application: Arktoons.
Vox Day and Arkhaven Comics announced a brand new initiative, Arktoons, that will be an alternative and competitor to the wildly popular Webtoons platform.
Arktoons is described as a “digital comics site featuring vertically-displayed comics panels in the Webtoons style that is particularly well-suited for reading on smartphones and tablets.”
The user will not be required to pay to access it. Subscriptions will be available to support specific creators, using a model heretofore put into place--successfully--with Unauthorized, the video streaming site that Vox Day put together; benefits are not specified at this time, but I would not be surprised if this also would allow access to Social Galactic (his social media site) the same way that Unauthorized subscribers do.
Okay, that's nice and all, but I have to ask: why would Webtoons readers leave that?
There is a massive amount of comics content on Webtoons, far more than could be exhausted. Arktoons is swimming against the Network Effect here, and exclusivity is insufficient a draw for people; much like Gab, Bitchute, et. al. merely being a rival network-dependent technology competing against the dominant player is a massive black mark against it. It does not help at all that it is aligned with politics that are openly attacked and suppressed by the dominant players across the West. (In the East, merely not being either the top dog or not state-sponsored is detrimental enough.)
This is not where the action is. The value of Webtoons is in the massive size of its user traffic. That's why they can get away with being not at top-end graphical fidelity; they're aiming at young normies with phones that get replaced every year or two, and normies never go out of their way for a damned thing. Making a rival app means telling normies about it, and if they don't balk at not being on Webtoons at all, they usually balk at who's behind it. In short, this is a massively hard sell and Vox isn't making it any easier by being out front.
Network Effect businesses are not nearly as open to competition as people would want there to be. We'll soon see if Arkhaven has the savvy to surmount the big challenge before it.
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