A few weeks ago, Webtoons hired Priya Girishanker as head of marketing for their English-language division. I noted at the time that her background, while impressive, was very much not based in storytelling and that signaled Webtoons' focus as not being on putting out good comics but their interest is more in ensuring that you become and stay a paying customer.
I concluded...
Does this mean I think Webtoon is going to be enshitified the same way those other platforms have been? Well, no, not the same way certainly. But if your company's focus is not on delighting your customers but on simply customer retention... well, that's going to lead to different types of 'innovation,' isn't it? I'm not going to lay all the blame here at Girishanker's feet, by any means, but I think rather that her hiring is a symptom of what we can expect to see from Webtoon as a company overall...Now let's take a look at this bit of yesterday's news from K-Comics Beat...
On the app, the “Daily Pass” icon still appears—but it’s now grayed out, replaced by the Ad Pass symbol. Tapping the info icon confirms the news: the Daily Pass is no longer available.And there's the start of Webtoons' enshitification right there. I'm only surprised it hit so quickly. It's almost too quickly relative to Girishanker's hire; I suspect this was a move that's been in the works for rather a while longer. As I said when she was hired, any issues that might happen to coincide with Girishanker's tenure are not necessarily indicative of her efforts, but rather that her hiring was simply a part of an already-in-place shift in strategy. Girishanker's relationship to this move, at most, will be reviewing whatever press release or announcement Webtoons might release about it. (As of this writing, I can't find any formal announcements from them.)
With this change, readers must now purchase coins to unlock episodes. Each episode costs three coins, meaning a reader could spend at least $9.99 a month just to follow a single series, assuming they haven’t previously unlocked any chapters. Longer series will, of course, cost more.
Now I'm not a regular user of Webtoons. I've got an account and checked out some comics there; the UI and UX is not appreciably better or worse than other similar platforms; I just haven't found many comics there that held my interest that weren't also being presented in another format I prefer more (i.e. their own websites). So this change doesn't really affect me. But I am familiar enough with how businesses work to see the direction this will continue to head down. I don't know precisely what moves Webtoons has got planned and in what timeframe(s) but I'm certain they'll continue pushing these types of changes out, one at a time. If they're adept enough at it, the changes will be small enough and incremental enough that most users will put up with them, and cumulatively they won't be pushed past a breaking point. As with most businesses that slowly degrade their products over time, Webtoons is counting on users' laziness and inertia to continue chipping away at features and functionality that they could actually charge for.
It's not uncommon to see people today complain about how Google/Amazon/Facebook/pick-a-platform has gotten worse over the past several years. The Webtoons would head this direction as well is hardly surprising. As I said, they won't be snhitified the same way as other platforms but they'll keep making things worse as long as they can keep finding ways to save themselves costs or bring in more revenue. Welcome to 2025. If you're not expecting this kind of thing now, where they hell have you been?
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