Tapastic Hits A Million Monthly Uniques And Gets An Additional $650,000 In Funding From Adam D'Angelo And Others

Tapastic Hits A Million Monthly Uniques And Gets An Additional $650,000 In Funding From Adam D'Angelo And Others Aug 14th 2013, 16:00, by Ryan Lawler When it comes to viewing and discovering new webcomics, there weren’t a whole lot of places to go before Tapastic came along. That’s probably why the site is growing quickly, now with more than a million monthly uniques. And so, the company has raised an additional $650,000 in seed funding to keep accelerating that growth. Tapastic was built to be sort of like a “YouTube for webcomics” — that is, a platform where creators can easily distribute their content and have it viewed by webcomic fans. Prior to its launch, webcomic creators had to piece together all their own tools for uploading and managing their presence online, as well as attracting readers on their own. But Tapastic not only gives them an easy-to-manage publishing platform, it also improves discoverability by providing a centralized place for the discovery of new artists. In just nine months, the site has grown to more than a million monthly uniques, coming from more than 200 countries. Tapastic CEO Chang Kim attributes much of that growth to the explosion in new content and creators that the platform has gotten on board since launch. It’s now the home of more than 11,000 comic strips from more than 560 creators. And the volume of content continues to grow at about a 10 percent pace every week. But it’s not just indie comic creators who are posting to its platform, but established brands like PhD Comics and The Joy of Tech are participating as well. The combination of a large and growing user base, as well as the ability to better monetize their content, has creators joining. On the monetization front, Tapastic does both an ad revenue split, a la YouTube, as well as paying licensing fees for certain high-quality content. With all that in mind, Tapastic brought on more funding to keep the growth going. It’s raised an additional $650,000 in seed funding from Adam D’Angelo, 500 Startups, and Strong Ventures, bringing total funding to $1.4 million since being founded. The company has about a dozen employees, and is based in San Jose, Calif. Media files: tapastic logo ryanlawler