Posted by Chang Kim, CEO
Here at Tapas Media, we recognized early on that mobile was “eating the world” and presenting unprecedented opportunities to every single industry, including the publishing industry. During this time, we were building one of the largest communities for bite-sized comics, where over 12,000 creators have published more than 280,000 episodes, translating to more than 700 million views so far.
Today we’re excited to announce our new app, Tapas, where we’ll be serving both comics and books. As the name suggests (“tapas” are bite-sized snacks in Spanish cuisine), the Tapas app is about bite-sized stories meant for mobile consumption.
There’s a general anxiety that smartphones are dominating people’s lives, and that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for books or comics to compete for their time and attention. However, we believe that the time spent on a smartphone isn’t necessarily a bad thing; that we can in fact utilize this time to promote a healthy, enriching, and engaging reading experience if we present stories in the right way.
Need for fundamental changes to publishing
In order to nurture a new reading environment, there need to be major changes to the publishing industry, especially from the perspective of mobile technology. A new crop of companies have emerged that have fundamentally changed their respective industries through vastly superior mobile offerings. Spotify (for music), Netflix (for movies and television), and Supercell (for games) have all fundamentally redefined their industries from a mobile perspective.
Similar mobile innovations have yet to occur in the publishing industry, which at about US $30bn a year is roughly twice the size of the music industry. Currently, the best mobile offerings for books and comics are e-book services like Kindle, iBooks, and Comixology, which fall into the “second generation” of media distribution. First generation were physical (books and CDs), while second generation were digital file purchases and downloads (MP3s and iTunes). eBooks simply repackage the same content for digital distribution, offering the same binary purchase experience as physical books (you either pay $12.99 and buy the title or not) while foregoing any form of engagement or flexibility.
Tapas: a new way of reading for the Snapchat generation
We wanted to build something truly innovative with Tapas, with a primarily focus on engagement and flexibility:
Bite-sized Serial Episodes (“BiSEps”). Tapas is all about the BiSEps, or bite-sized serial episodes. The way people consume content on mobile is different and is centered around the 3–5 minutes of “micromoments” throughout the day. We created a mobile reading experience conducive to mobile lifestyle. Only have time for a short story snack? Perfect. Enjoy an episode from a comic or novel optimized for 3–5 minutes. Got a little bit more time? Even better! Binge read a few more episodes.
Monetization and user engagement modeled after mobile games.Tapas borrows inspiration from the massively successful free-to-play and freemium business models prevalent in so many of today’s most popular games, which account for 80–90% of all app store revenue. Readers start by reading for free, and can unlock more stories using virtual keys, similar to unlocking additional stages of a game. Keys can be purchased, or earned by waiting or watching ads (these are currently under development). Instead of hesitating to buy a book because you’re not sure if you’ll like it, just start reading for free and unlock the episodes you want. You never have to pay for more than you want to read.
Data and Social for creators. We’ve talked a lot about readers, but we have a ton of benefits to offer creators as well. So many writers don’t have access to in-depth analytics regarding who their readers are, or what parts of their story are being engaged with the most. We originally built Tapastic.com, an open publishing platform for comics, where we provided a creator dashboard with a full content management system and episode-level analytics. We focused on socially-driven features such as subscribing, commenting, and messaging, all with real-time notifications. We hope to provide this and more for writers on Tapas.
How Tapas can help creators and readers
With Tapas, we want to help everyone read and create more. We want to accomplish this by providing fun and engaging stories in bite-sized, snackable pieces that fit into your daily life.
We want Tapas to be the best platform to publish on mobile in every way possible, including monetization, reader and creator engagement, data analytics, and more. There are already a ton of top writers and publishers publishing with Tapas, and we’re very excited to showcase more top tier talent in the days to come.
How YOU can help
We’ve just launched the first version of our app, and are currently hard at work pushing out updates to add features and smooth out rough edges here and there. We’d love for you to help us spread the word and leave us helpful feedback!
Happy reading! For more information please visit tapas.io.
