The Interledger Community 🌱: FlipToons

Come read Web Monetized Comics at Fliptoons! - MozFest 2022 Action Plan

James Casia — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 07:16:34 +0000

Fliptoons is a new comic platform implementing web monetization. We host comics, and hold competitions for local Filipino artists. We held the Web Monetized Comic Challenge last year in which 60+ comic creators duked it out for the grand prize. The result was a staggering compilation of unique, incredible, and entertaining comics on our platform.

Here’s a list of our top picks!

D'Unlucky Juans (by M@ching)

Down on luck, Kokoy inherited a "lucky" house and genuinely has charm over his fate. But what if someone suffers in exchange for his comfort?

ABOVE AND BEYOND (by Raykosen)

When the utopian Neo Manila City faces its imminent ruin due to its draining battery, two best friends who are young delivery boys named Phil Ayuno and Migo Horace must go on a journey to get the battery replacement that will restore their city. However, outside their area, danger lurks and terrifying monsters await.

Ghost of Chiba (by Ian)

After his mother died a month ago, the 15 year old boy from Tokyo (Nagatomo,Konishi) has to transfer to Chiba to continue his freshmen year. Konishi always had this prophetic dream about alien invasion and doomsday.

Digmaang Salinlahi (by jonzam)

Digmaang Salinlahi ay sumusunod sa mga pangyayari sa Digmaang sumisilakbo sa mga mahiwagang lupain ng Kahimanawari sa pagitan ng mga Lumang Kahariang Tao na kaalyado ng mga Enkanto at ng Konseho.

Point Blank (by notShaneLopez)

Zack Harris was about to go to sleep when he stumbles into another world by accident. Befriending the magician Merr Win, he sets out to find a way home. Join Zack as he makes his way through the strange world filled with a plethora of (un)familiar people, places, and personalities.

BERSERKING (by Kapumax)

The boy named zoom tries to make a simple and peaceful life being an employee but his faith always put him in the scenarios where his ability and braveness need, what zoom will do? Find out now!

Of course, these are only a few of the amazing comics found on our site. To get the full list, head over to Fliptoons.ph

What you can do

100% of the payments streamed goes directly to the artists’ pockets! This is a way of supporting our local Filipino artists. If you really enjoyed reading their content, consider tipping them and sharing to your friends!

If you're interested in our work and would like to hear more from us, follow us on our socials! We’re also on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Fliptoons - Web Monetized Comic Platform — Grant Report #2

James Casia — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 18:34:15 +0000

Image

This image was taken right at the end of our livestream announcement of the winners of the Web Monetized Comic Challenge. Top Left(Camelle Gomez). Top Right(James Casia). Bottom Left(Kent Makibulan). Bottom Right(Jeanzel Ending - our friend who helped us host the awarding).

Project Update

We have finished the major features of the site, namely:

Comic reader page which have web monetization enabled if the author of the comic specified his/her wallet pointer
A web monetized comic title page which lists all necessary details of the comic and all its episodes
Creator dashboard which let creators create comics/shorts and manage them
Home page showcasing the Discover, Top Ranking, New Releases, New Episodes, and Continue Reading section
Feed page with discover, comics, shorts, and votes subsection all relating to the Web Monetization Comic Challenge
Voting system for the Web Monetization Comic Challenge
User authorization, authentication, and settings. We also implemented IP banning to minimize automated user creation and to optimize the integrity of the voting system
Blog site for important announcements

All in all, the site is now a fully functioning comic platform.

We have gathered comic creators and readers onto our site. We have achieved our goal of more than 50 comics (57 comics published as of Dec. 12, 2021 09:00 PM) and now have a whopping 856 registered users! Some additional milestones that are worth noting (as of Dec. 12, 2021 09:00 PM):

Total number of episodes read: 6062
Total number of creators: 93
Total number of creators with Web Monetization enabled: 16
Average monthly active users: 226
Over 12k site visits in the month of November 2021
Over 60k page views in the month of November 2021

We have concluded the Web Monetized Comic Challenge and identified and awarded our winners. Blog Article here. We have also collected valuable feedback from both our creators and readers. With us, they have shared their reservations. See Progress on Objectives

Progress on objectives

The objectives that we detailed in the proposal were:

(1) Determine if webcomics is a great fit to a micropayment streaming monetization model
(2) Give content creators more options to monetize their work and protect consumers from privacy invasive ads and the inconvenience from too many subscriptions
(3) To create more awareness, especially Filipinos, to the problem with the web’s current business model and to introduce more people into web monetization

To answer our hypothesis and to achieve our first objective, we did three things

(1) First is we did the math to find if Coil is actually viable for comics. We actually did this before applying for this grant. Access it here. The premises haven't changed so we can still consider it valid. Web comics remains an ideal application to Coil's micropayment streaming payment solution.

(2) We set our metrics for success in our proposal and we were able to meet them. As we wrote in the proposal:

The goal of the competition is to acquire, and expose as many comic creators and readers to Web monetization as possible. The competition will be considered a success if the following are met:

All winner slots are filled

At least 50 web comics are published on the site during competition

At least 100 signups(inclusive of readers and creators) during competition

Now we don't know if we set the bar high or low. But we were able to meet them :)

(3) We conducted a survey on our users and here’s what we got. Here are the most remarkable responses we were able to get(We picked the negative and the positive ones).

Can you tell us about your experience using the site?

I had difficulties uploading panels since it only accepts pre-cut images of 1080×1080, if the last panel is shorter than that it always give an error message, I have to edit it again (last panel) to fit the required size. But overall the website has a great potential.
The site is amazing. Simple UI that everyone can understandeasy to upload, user friendly
Its very easy but i always use a phone to manage comic creating, i hope someday the fliptoon become compatible for phone to create or edit publishing comic
I feel safe using it and I'll be able to earn money.
It has potential but it lacks some features.
So far its good that everytime someone fresh uploads gets displayed in features and its good. But the problem is sometimes it glitches when you try to read one of the comics.

What can you say about web monetization?(if they monetized their comics)

Interesting approach
My readers think it’s still a difficult process setting up
I am able to recieve an amount daily via Uphold notifications. It's not really a huge amount but I can see the potential for my future works. I connected it to my Youtube too and tried to share video link the other day and I was surprised with the incoming amount too. I'm really happy and grateful for it because I'll be able to earn money even if it's just a little amount only.
Its hard to use due to membership thing.

Why didn’t you monetize your comics? What are your reservations?(if they didn’t monetize their comics)

Uphold is asking for a valid ID, I lost my wallet with all my cards and stuff so I had difficulties verifying myself there. Might have to get a valid id again next month
Not yet because i read bad reviews about uphold ..about how withdrawal is slow etc..just check their google playstore app. I'm also a little bit hesitant if my personal info will be safe in uphold
I was just planning to do so, but i would love to monetize a different story, not the one that i put as an entry. Im already working on my new story to be monetize by the way
Dont know how
My works are web monetized. Initially, I don't want to spend 10USD for both Coil and Uphold. lol.
For me, those who didn't monetize their comics they lose their chance to earn money.
The coil requires membership of $5 and dont have that kind of money.

Can you tell us about your experience in the Web Monetized Comic Challenge event?

It was amazing. While doing my entry for the Special Award Category, I had to really immerse myself to the web monetization. The missing part is the actual "web monetized" experience. So when I was given the promo code and experience beind web monetized, then it really opened a new horizon for me as a creator.
It is challenging for me because i find it hard to understand how it really works. But as I dive in in the topic, i finally understand what we monetization means. Hopefully more creators will monetize their comic.
It is quite challenging most especially I made my comics in a month.
It is a fun learning experience.

Do you have any other feedback for us, the team or the site(Fliptoons.ph)?

Keep up the good work! I know that your hard works will be paid someday and your goal being the number 1 webcomic platform will come true.
You did very well organizing this type of event. Kudos to you guys
For now none, stay strong and goodluck
Thank you so much for creating an online platform for comic/webtoon creators. I believe that artists need a place to get their stories be known to the world. Moreover, thank you fliptoons team for being friendly and approachable in replying to my inquiries.
I personally like the logo and branding look of the website btw.I suggest that the Fliptoons website will have a creator page where the visitors/readers can see all creators in one page being archived with their works. This could be the edge of the website. Also another suggestion is the interactivity part where the readers can comment on the comic chapters and to the creator's page. A forum would be great too in order to establish a Fliptoons Community where the creators and the readers can interact with each other. If a forum is not possible as of the moment, a Facebook group or Discord can be a great start.

Based on the survey we have thought that although $5 is chump change for people from first world countries, it still is a steep fee for most Filipinos. A lower subscription fee might help adoption a bit better. This way the barrier to entry is lowered and more Filipinos can have access to web monetized content.

Also, although we have done our best to let our creators be on board with web Monetization. Some still have valid reservations such as Uphold having bad reviews, Uphold requiring KYC, and some were misinformed(although we explicitly told them that it's not the case) that creators need to have a subscription to monetize. Partly to blame was the creator being greeted with the pseudo-paywall at the beginning. It may have repelled curious creators wanting to try Web Monetization out.

For objectives (2) we have achieved this to some extent through the creation of the site itself. A number of creators were able to have been given fairer ways to monetize their work through Web Monetization.

and (3) , We were able to achieve this to some extent through the Web Monetized Comic Challenge Shorts Special award. The special award was awarded to the comics that highlighted the problems with the advertisements business model and how web monetizations help solve them. We had a considerable amount of users reading out short entries. And we plan to share these shorts on our social media and on this feed real soon.

Key activities

The key activities for our project are the following:
(1) The site launch; and
(2) The Web Monetized Comic Challenge

We successfully launched our site last November 3. On launch day, we immediately had multiple comics uploaded to our site and tons of interested readers. Here is an image of our site(albeit not on launch day)

The Web Monetized Comic Challenge was our main marketing push for the site. We were giving out over $4000 usd in prizes to the best comics and to the ones that tackle the problem of the advertisement business model and how web monetization helps solve them. The competition included votings, so creators need to gather their fans from other sites to vote for their comics. We thought this was a good way to gain creators and readers at the same time.

Here is a the publication material we made for the competition:
*The prize is in our local currency

We launched the Web Monetized Comic Challenge a few months earlier before our site launch, on August 30. We had a pre-enlistment form and were able to get 80+ pre-enlisters in the first few months. By the middle of November, creators were now able to submit their comics into the competition. We got 32 comic entries total for the main challenge of the competition and 7 for the Special award category.

Here is an image for some of the entries:
Here is an image for the rankings:

The Web Monetized Comic Challenge concluded on December 13. We announced the winners through a livestream on Facebook live(more details in next section). The top ten comics for the main challenge were scored based on the judge's scores and votings. The Special award which was a 3-page short comic about web monetization were decided by us, the core team. Overall, we think the event was a success based on the feedback we were getting and the success metrics we set.

Communications and marketing

We were interviewed by Jon Zamar, a Komikon organizer (annual comic book fan convention in the Philippines), and a comic book author with 15 years of experience in comic book productions (New Online Comics Platform: Fliptoons.PH).
We have also made videos in our Youtube channel on:
- setting up a payment pointer for Coil using uphold( Fliptoons.ph - Setting up your payment pointer);
- getting Web Monetized in our Website (Fliptoons.ph - Setting up your coil account); and
- how Fliptoons was created and how Web Monetization helps artists (Getting to know Fliptoons.ph).
Our main channel where we communicate with our community is our Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/fliptoonsph. Right now we’re at 650 likes and we’re followed by 689 people.
- Here is an image of our page.
- Within the last 30 days, we were able to reach 25,748 people, had 4,012 post engagements, and 86 page likes.
We also update our blog and share it on our Facebook page. Our blog page contains:
- an introduction to Fliptoons (Getting to know Fliptoons);
- an introduction to the Web Monetized Comic Challenge (WMCC) (Web Monetized Comic Challenge - Fliptoons Blog );
- the guidelines for WMCC (WMCC Guidelines );
- the progress report on the state of the website during development (Progress Report );
- and the call for artists to monetize their works and readers to subscribe (https://blog.fliptoons.ph/subscribe-to-your-favorite-artists-through-coil ).
The announcement of the winners of the Web Monetized Comic Challenge took place live on our facebook page on December 13. As of December 15, we garnered 300+ views on that video, 120+ comments, 426 reactions, comments, and shares, and 326 people reached. Here is a snap of our live event
It is important for us to communicate effectively with our participants so we made it a habit to update them weekly. We update our Facebook, Instagram(@flip_toons), and Twitter(@flip_toons) accounts .We also manage a Facebook group (Fliptoons.ph ) for creators where we also share updates with more than 80 members already.

What’s next?

We’ve completed our grant timeline. For the coming months, we plan to do basic work to maintain the site and community. We’re gonna hold off developing any new features or events for now to take a much needed break (and also focus on our final semester in college). We are eyeing on getting a second grant though, in the second half of 2022 to scale our project, community and the team.

What community support would benefit your project?

There are three ways you can help support our creators and our platform:

Read the comics of our creators. And if you really like their comics, make sure to stay on their sites long as to stream more payments ;). We highly recommend the comics listed here for a start.
If you know anyone who makes comics, please share our site with them! The more creators we have on our platform, the more readers we’ll get!.
If you know someone who likes reading comics, please share our site with them!

Additional comments

We would like to thank Grant For The Web and the Interledger Foundation for trusting us. Being still students with no major experience to back, our expectations were low,but we actually got this grant alongside the established and awe-inspiring other grantees. We hope that we get to work on this project more :)

Relevant links/resources

Sharing interesting comic/shorts we have on the platform about Web Monetization. We plan to post these comics one by one on this feed.

Sweet Sweet Content by notShaneLopez
Web Monetization is the way by Raykosen
Link, xClick!x by YukiKuro

Join us live as we announce the winners of the Web Monetized Comic Challenge

James Casia — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 12:05:24 +0000

We are live on facebook!

Fliptoons.ph is LIVE!!

James Casia — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 14:51:43 +0000

Fliptoons.ph is now live! Well, Fliptoons went live last November 3 but we didn't feel that it was good enough to share here. Back then, there was still a ton of bugs to fix and features not implemented.

Today marks the day we're finally done with most of the code work!! It sure is difficult shuffling school work(good thing we're on our last year) with building Fliptoons and maintaining our community but we were able to get through all of it. We're quite happy with the results and feedback we're getting from readers and comic creators. We are at 200 unique users, and 25 comic uploads and counting!

The Web Monetized Comic Challenge is well underway and will conclude this December 13th! For those who don't know, the Web Monetized Comic Challenge is a comic creation competition open to Filipinos. It also awards comic shorts that give light on the problems with the web's current business models and how Web Monetization helps solve them. Make sure to check it out and view our top entries!

Fliptoons — Grant Report #1

James Casia — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 14:01:10 +0000

Project Update

We're currently developing the minimum viable product and is already hosting the Web Monetized Comic Challenge. For those who don't know, the Web Monetized Comic Challenge is a 3-month long competition that aims to invite artists from all over the Philippines to publish and monetize their webcomics using the privacy-respecting web monetization standard. This competition also challenges artists to create comics that shed light on the privacy invasiveness of ads and the problems surrounding them.

The number one challenge for us is working on this project while going to college at the same time. Despite all that, we are still very positive that we will be able to attain the objectives within the 6-month period.

Progress on objectives

Before we could start developing the frontend of the website, we had to come up with a mockup first. It took long for us to come up with a design we were okay with. After long deliberation, we have come up with these designs. Here are a few snaps of our mockup.

This is the homepage and the comic title page.

This is the competition feed and the vote modal.

These are the create comic pages.

The development of the backend started with the designing of the structure of data to be put into the database [MongoDB]. By then, the first structure being laid out is the admin data and blog data. After, this was then implemented using Nodejs and Express. The result was that all backend calls to handle admin and blog queries were implemented. The next step was to create the layout for the blog site and connect it into the backend to provide all necessary data. The last step for this portion was to deploy it and use it for our first blog post/announcement. The blog site was successfully deployed using Heroku and Godaddy. Alongside the blog site’s deployment is the deployment of the placeholder for the Fliptoons website, for it to be not blank when a user accesses our site and to redirect them to our blog and official social media accounts.

The next big part of the development was to handle user accounts, with this, the structure of user data was planned out and implemented to the backend afterwards. With the user auth ready on the backend side (signup, login, change password, etc...), the next step was to create the front-end for these functionalities. The necessary auth-related pages were created using NuxtJs (a Vue framework that supports SSR) and eventually connected to its backend functions. Now, all initial user/auth related functionalities were done.

Following the auth portion is the comic uploading section of Fliptoons. With this, same as the previous portion, we started structuring the data then implementing it on the backend. As of the moment, we are finalizing this portion on the backend to provide queries/functionalities to upload and view comics on the backend. In this portion we utilized a media service called Cloudinary to store all image assets efficiently and easily. When this is ready, the development of its frontend counterpart will be implemented, and by then the initial features for our initial public release will be ready.

Here are a few screenshots.

MongoDB as the database (w/ initial data structure for blogs and users)

Back-end API (MongoDB and Express), Fliptoons Blog (Nuxt) , and Fliptoons (Nuxt) running on the terminal

Fliptoons Official Blog page (https://blog.fliptoons.ph)

Initial placeholder for Fliptoons Website (https://www.fliptoons.ph)

Fliptoons Website current development state (*authentication portion)

Fliptoons Website, Blog, and Backend deployed using Heroku

Key activities

One of the key activities we have done in the 1st half of the grant period is the announcement of the Web Monetized Comic Challenge. We created our social media channels, gathered participants, and were able to hire reputable comic icons in the Philippines as our judges. Another is the completion of our website mockup and designs. And one of the most significant thing we have done is starting the development of the website.

Communications and marketing

We had teased the project ever since August started in our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. Between the first post and the announcement of the competition, we were preparing our blog(https://blog.fliptoons.ph/) to share the origins of Fliptoons, how Web Monetization will be used for the website and the guidelines for the competition. After the announcement of the competition, we garnered a steady increase of followers in all of our accounts. A pre-enlistment form was attached to the posts in order to give us an idea of how many participants to expect.

Following the announcement, the team had the chance to be interviewed by the co- founder of Komikon (a popular comics convention in the Philippines), Jon Zamar, who has been in Comics Production for 15 years. In the interview, we shared how Web Monetization provides secure payment streams to Filipino comic artists and how this new technology can help artists in earning through their craft. You can check out the interview here: https://youtu.be/ATA21WYFUlQ

Judges for the competition were chosen based on their huge influence in the comics scene in the Philippines. We invited Cartoonist ZACH, a young cartoonist with over 40,000 followers and growing, Jhamycka, co-founder and president of Webkom Alliance (a non-profit organization with the goal of uniting and supporting all aspiring Filipino creators), and Jon Zamar. We decided to introduce a judge every week to keep our followers at the edges of their seats. These posts were followed up by updates on the guidelines and frequently asked questions (FAQs). We also emailed the participants to the addresses they provided in the pre-enlistment form for any changes in the competition.

We started running ads in the third week of September on Facebook and Instagram. We first experimented on which advertising format was more effective during this week. By boosting a single post, we observed a steady increase of engagements. To find the better method in advertising, we decided to compare it to the Carousel feature on Facebook which could display photos seamlessly without leaving the post. We ended up using the Carousel format since this format had garnered more engagements possibly because it conveniently provided all the necessary information for the competition without leaving the post. Ever since then, we continuously ran ads for the competition. We also just recently ran ads on Twitter for the competition.

Through the ads, we have already received 60 messages, inquiring about the competition. So far, we’ve garnered at least 50 responses from the pre-enlistment form alone which is already impressive. As of writing, we are still gathering as many participants as we can by continuing our ad campaigns in all of our social media platforms.

What’s next?

We will continue developing the website and continue hosting the Web Monetized Comic Challenge. We are still in the process of building our MVP and look forward to launching it by the first week of November. We will closely communicate with our artist and reader users for feedback.

What community support would benefit your project?

It would really help if the web monetization community can help us grow the Fliptoons community by liking and sharing our social media pages, and interacting with our posts. If you're a webcomic artist or reader please try using the site, share with you friends, and give us feedback :)

Additional comments

That is all for now. Thanks for reading our update! 'Til next time!