November 23, 2018 || By Kevin

Tivan Comics - Fighting Digital Piracy By Creating the "YouTube For Comics"

Hey guys,

Welcome to Tivan Comics! The aim of the project is to give free comics to readers, ensure creators get paid, and mitigate piracy. Seems like a goliath of a task, but I think Tivan Comics has solved the issue.

So first off, I just want to dive into the piracy aspect of digital comics/manga, because that is where the idea originally stems from.

When it comes to digital comic consumption, piracy is actually the number one way readers consume comics. This is even worse in the manga industry, but since we are in the comic part of Amino I'll make this a deep dive into the trends of piracy in the digital comic space. You guys all know that piracy sucks. It takes the hard work that creators put in, and strips away any sort of monetary reward that they would have otherwise gotten. So if it sucks so much, why do people still pirate comics?

The answer is really simple; because its free & because its super easy.

I don't think any reader is vindictively going to these pirate websites with the intention that "muahahaha I am stealing from this artist", its just an easy way to consume comics for free. That's where the idea for Tivan Comics was born, but first let me breakdown how rampant piracy actually is.

So now comes the fun part, breaking down the numbers.

Amongst the biggest comic websites, the largest of all digital comic websites is not Marvel or DC, but readcomiconline.to. Readcomiconline.to dwarfs anything else in the digital comic space, and its super easy to use. You jump on, search for the series, and everything is available for free in super high quality.

I'm not the only one who thinks its easy to use. The website gets about 20M views per month, with the average visitor checking out 20 pages and spending 14 mins per visit. The graphic below just shows you the same numbers.

So we can see that there people actively engaged with these websites. Note their bounce rates as well, it is low. The bounce rate is when a visitor leaves before checking out anything, and we can see that the majority of readers who enter these websites like to check-around.

But how does this stack up against the legal alternatives like Comixology? Take a look:

We can see that Comixology, perhaps the go-to place for digital comics online doesn't even come close.

So with all these statistics, its clear to see that folks like reading comics for free. I don't think its inherently wrong to like free, but it sucks for the creators who are getting their work pirated. That's why I thought Tivan Comics would be cool. It makes it so the readers get to access content for free, while the creators get paid via the ads.

Now I know you're looking at this post and thinking "will the ads be enough?", and the answer is yes. If I did the math correctly at least!

Just to give a bit of clarity as to how ads revenue is calculated, I just have to explain some terms. CPM rates are how ad-networks like Google AdSense pay out for displaying ads on their website. These rates are calculated for every 1000 impressions. In 2018 the average Google AdSense rate (according to my research) was $2.80. Just to be super safe, lets halve the number and work with it. So lets pretend that we're only getting half of the average CPM rate, which is $1.40 per 1000 impressions.

Here is the breakdown:

An average comic issue/chapter has about 25 pages. These numbers can be used to calculate the average revenue per comic.

Mash all that together and you get:

With digital comics usually selling for 99 cents, we can see that it only takes about 10 readers to equal 1 digital purchase, and we know readers consume more comics when its free versus any sort of pay-wall.

Just to be super clear, readcomiconline does not make this kind of crazy revenue. They aren't on a premium ad-network, because all the comics are pirated, and they only have 1-2 ads per issue, versus flanking each individual page. Regardless, a lot of potential revenue has been taken from artists, and I'll go more into that below. Also, I just want to make it super clear, I don't hate readcomiconline. They are just filling a void right now, but it just sucks that while advertisers and consumers win, creators lose out.

So that kind of concludes my dive into piracy in the digital comic space, and why I think a model like Tivan Comics would work. I think the YouTube, gaming, streaming, and patreon communities have shown us that people like to support creators once a relationship is established, and I think this is a great way for comic creators to build those communities. Almost all of those other communities I mentioned offer their content "for free", with ads subsidizing the cost. That isn't to say comic readers shouldn't buy their favourite creators' work, they 100% should. Again, I think that is proven with the support consumers have for creators once the relationship is forged. If we equate this back to YouTube, YouTubers sell merch to grow/diversify, and you can think of buying the comic as a creators' "merch".

To me it seems that advertisers are willing to foot the bill, so why pass the buck on to the consumer?

After showing some of publishers how much money they've lost already (some partners have lost upwards of $500k potential revenue), Tivan Comics has lined up about 300 titles for launch. We have started a Kickstarter to move into the next phase of the project. The website is fully built, and the majority of the funds will go towards publisher reassurance. Because the model is so vastly different from the typical way digital comics are distributed, some of the larger publishers want some sort of reassurance. The current ask is just to secure the partnerships we have lined up, and pursue a couple of new ones. Its just a drop in the bucket.

Tivan Comics is trying to compete against the pirate alternatives, and that can only be done if a huge library is amassed. If there isn't enough content, readers will just go back to where the comics are. Here is a link to our Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1968354394/tivan-comics-free-comic-reading-platform

Any support would be awesome. If you think TC is a cool concept, tweet at your favourite artists and publishers telling them to join us. Thanks again for trucking through this message.

Always,

Tivan Comics Team

TL;DR - Piracy sucks, but its the number 1 way comics are consumed. Tivan Comics is a free comic book platform that is free for users, and pays creators via advertisements.