In the USA, Japan, France, and Indonesia, webtoons are popularized by offering global webtoon services and webtoon platforms already have a lot of titles. However, a problem occurs here. There are so many titles available that it is difficult for consumers to find what they are looking for.

 

  One way to solve this problem is the curation. According to the author Michael Bhaskar of the book 'Curation', the nature of curation is to take out a lot of information to meet the specific standard. The curation would only serve it's essential purpose by focusing on 'what to not show?' rather than 'what to show?'.

  Recommending a collection of contents to consumers is not a good curation. According to the author Susan Weinschenk of the book '100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People', people can't remember more than 4 pieces of information at once. As the amount of information that can be perceived by a consumer is limited, recommending a bunch of titles by claiming 'we prepared so many because we didn't know what you'd like~' could actually bring indecisiveness to consumers. Besides, in the case of mobile users, due to the small screen size and a few amounts of contents that can be displayed on it, the content should be selected through strict curation criteria. Then which criteria should webtoon services use to curate their titles? We have established the standards based on the report created by 'EMBRAIN' after surveying webtoon service users.

  The first criterion is the 'sub-genre'. According to the report on webtoon consumers, the factor people consider most important when choosing a webtoon it's genre. Among all genres, picking to sub-genres like 'fantasy' or 'BL', which further refine the tastes of consumers, is better at instantaneously identifying the desires of webtoon service users rather than opting for the popular genres of 'romance' or 'drama'. For a detailed description,   please refer to this article.

The second criterion one should consider is 'the webtoon's achievements that could prove the quality of it's story' by checking if it has won any contest awards, or if it is based on a popular web novel. Stories are a significant factor for consumers when deciding which webtoons they want to read. In particular, webtoon consumers who are in their 30s and over tend to pay more attention to the stories than the illustrations. For consumers with such tendency, emphasizing that the webtoon has won a contest award, or it is adapted from a famous web novel could help to assure it's quality.

 

The third criterion is the 'social signifier'. People tend to follow the behavior of others when they're not sure what to do in certain situations. In such tentative scenarios, there are traces made by others that could be utilized to identify their general behavior and these are called social signifiers. Examples of social signifiers in webtoon services would be the number of subscribers of a specific title, the title's popularity rank and production news which announce the webtoon's film/ TV show adaptation. These social signifiers increase the likelihood of encountering interesting titles for consumers who are new to the webtoon contents.

 

The fourth criterion is the 'author'. If a webtoon service user had a good experience with a particular artist's work, or has heard many positive comments about the artist, a title with the same artist's name in it will guarantee fun. Especially, when one highlights that the author has created popular titles in the past that the consumers could relate to, it will help them to find the right titles for their taste.

 

The final criterion is to check 'whether any promotion is being applied' for the webtoon like free episodes or discount rates. Even if a title is extremely popular it is not easy for many webtoon consumers to read webtoons if they pay for them. Recognizing such nature of consumers, recommending titles that would become totally free, distribute it's free episodes, or provide discount rates later on, could make the webtoon service users who disregard paid webtoons to get used to them. These benefits will grant the opportunity for consumers who rejected paid webtoons previously to perhaps start enjoying paid webtoons with fewer burdens. In fact, as consumers get more accustomed to webtoon services in general, they will become more likely to read paid webtoons.

 

So far, we have summarized the standards that can form the basis for the curation of webtoon services. We would proceed further and finish the article by informing about the two caveats in webtoon curation.

 

Firstly,   never try to display too many webtoons on one page.  As mentioned earlier, there is a limit to the amount of information people could perceive. For mobile users,   there also is the limitation of screen size on which the content can be displayed. Keep in mind that not all users will scroll until the content they want is shown on their mobile or PC screen. It is necessary to understand the service context of each platform, select the titles that are suitable it's users, and give up the rest. That way one could truly emphasize the webtoon that the platform wants to expose.

 

Finally,   continuous observation and data analysis are required for content categorization.  Categorization means classifying various information that one has about a particular subject according to certain criteria. Michael Bhaskar said better curators should go beyond just selecting fine content and definitely need to know how to categorize the content. Examples of categorization methods adopted in webtoon services are classifying titles by their publication days, genres and other factors.   Categorization is applied to help users find their favorite titles within the webtoon platform. The service environments around consumers are always changing. Hence,   in addition to the webtoon curation criteria we discussed earlier,   one should consistently look for any new category that has appeared for the users to explore titles.

This month's article is up to here. I sincerely hope many consumers will end up finding the webtoons they want to have a read of. Thank you.

 

-Kim Mino