Tapas sees Big Gains for Digital Comics, according to Publishers Weekly

According to a new report from Publishers Weekly’s Rob Salkowitz, Tapas, formerly known as Taptastic, and Comics Panda, a smaller U.S.-based mobile comics startup, has announced impressive recent growth, along with plans to partner with traditional print publishers like Scholastic.

For those who aren’t familiar with Tapas, it is a similar webcomic platform like Webtoons, which is owned by Korean Tech Giant LINE. Tapas was founded by South Korean Entrepreneur, Chang Kim in 2012, since then it has grown a dedicated community of readers and creators through a popular mobile app, Tapas.io, which features “snackable” vertical-scroll episodic webcomics and stories. In the last year, the privately-held company announced it had reached 100 million episode-unlocks (paid content transactions) and saw total 2020 payments to Tapas creators rise to $14 million. The company does not make its financial data public, Tapas announced a 5x revenue increase in the 12 months between October, 2019 and October 2020. One particularly active period saw users spend $100,000 on content in a single day (the average is typically $50,000-$70,000). Numbers like those made Tapas the #3 top grossing comics app on Android and the #9 top grossing book app on IoS by revenue in 2020.