On this hell-sent platform of yaoi and relatable content, one of the most inevitable things to happen is spam bots. After getting super excited with 35 notifications, thinking someone has just binged my content, only for the spam bots to have hit once again, with their bland usernames with no profile picture and their famous opening line “Hi dear friends”, or something in a similar vain. (Sidenote – I want every sentence in this comment section to start off with a version of “Hi dear friends”.) After their flattering, vague compliments of “This cool work”, “This awesome work”, or my personal favourite “This great story” on my random art page with zero (0) story, they want you to rate their “cool” and “private” story on a website called zamaw.com (I know there are a few websites they rotate, but for the purposes of this piece of writing, I’ll use zamaw to refer to them). If you want to know what zamaw.com is because you’re too scared you’ll get a virus, it’s porn! It’s a breast emporium as like 7 naked girls who they found on google images (without the safeseach, you naughty rascals) line up in a smash brothers-esque way as a silhouette of a muscly man with a large erect member stands there, with the implication that that man could be you!

By this point, you probably can tell that I’m poking fun at zamaw and it’s marketing team for it’s tactics, but there’s a small part of me that feels sorry for zamaw! Look at you, zamaw! What are you doing? Why are you marketing in the Tapas comments? Is it because Tapas calls itself the “YouTube of Comics”, and when you think of YouTube, you think of the horrendous spam comments? (By the way, Tapas, you’re not the YouTube of comics, that’s WEBTOON, you’re more of the Vimeo, because the comment section isn’t as toxic, and you “in theory” allow some things 12 year old girls aren’t supposed to see.) And why the porn? And why the straight porn? Do you even know what Tapas is about? Here, zamaw, buddy, honey, baby, let me give you a hint into the inner workings of Tapas, and what you can do to advertise more directly to the Tapas audience of your dreams.

Let’s first talk about Tapas, your marketing platform, your stepping stone to higher ground. Tapas is extremely found of it’s romance. One look into the popular comics page and you will see nothing but romance. Another thing to note is that there is a lot of pretty boys. On the top section of the popular comics, before it keeps autoloading more popular romance novels, it’s predominantly straight, about 60% stories about girls chasing guy (two of the most popular, My Fair Footman and The Duke’s Servant, are about girls pretending to be guys and falling in love with the male counterparts, which is kinda gay but like it’s played to be bisexual but is it I don’t know), but no matter what it is, the men in these stories either look like a K-Pop star or a WWE wrestler. Also, judging by the people commenting on some of these stories and my knowledge of how people act on the internet, the majority of readers on Tapas are 15-20 year old females.

Now I pose this question to you, zamaw. Why would you actively advertise straight porn aimed at men on a website that is used by girls? And sure, there are a lot of girls that watch straight porn, but even still, having the audacity to censor the burly muscly man who probably doesn’t exist, but to oversexualize the photos of women? Are you out of your mind?

We’ve looked enough at the strong men in these comics, so let’s look at your “sexy” girls who, according to your website, I want to “fuck”. Aesthetics is kind of hard to distinguish, due to the lack of clothing, but from what I can gather, your core audience is someone who thirsts over thots. Your core audience at the moment, is fuckboys. Little piss baby fuckboys. I can say with a fair amount of confidence that if Tapas is lacking in any demographic, it’s the fuckboys. Not only because edgy comics about shoving rats up your arse and saying rude words like “shit” and “fuck” for a punchline are barely existent in modern Tapas culture, only to be found if you are able to search comics by subscribers and then click on the last page (a neat little thing you used to back in the day), but the comment section on basically any comic isn’t littered with 15 year old boys with spikey hair trying to convince people that they’ve had sex multiple times before the age of 10. But let’s look int the aesthetics of thots and see how they differ from the aesthetics of the depiction of female characters in the most popular Tapas comics.

Thots are characterised by a lot of things, but the culmination of them all seem to make them easy to distinguish, according to the internet. First of all, makeup is essential. Out of the 10 girls you can choose, one (seemingly) doesn’t have makeup, which is the one on the far right. Aside from her, everyone is caked out with makeup. Everyone has long hair, and aside from one, everyone has vaguely blonde long hair. All of the breasts seem to be the same size and look very similar. Other commonalities are piercings in the bellybuttons or nipples, and a couple have tattoos.

Now let’s look at the girls of Tapas. Although it is a bit hard to tell due to the characters being drawings and not photorealistic, it seems to be implied that the majority don’t wear makeup, and when they do it’s very minimal. To be fair though, the men in these stories seem to be hogging all the makeup to themselves. Most of the hairstyles of the characters are not long, but instead either bobs or pixie cuts. There are some long haired protagonists (see What’s Wrong with You, Duke?, Lights, Camera, Love! and Am I Too Old for A Boyfriend?, which are all great and silly names), but they come in few and far in between. Anyway, it’s all very far from a thot. In fact, it’s so far from thot, that it’s kind of similar to that bimbofication meme from a while back, where a girl who reads books drops her books and becomes a sex icon? It’s a strange fetishy part of the internet, but it does show how the internet has divided women into two stereotypes. Sadly, most people who grew up with the internet try to catergorise themselves into these harmful stereotypes, which is bad and a topic for another day. Anyway, I think that zamaw is targeting to the wrong stereotype.

Now hopefully you have a better understanding of what Tapas users want, let’s now go onto how you advertise it. First of all, I think you need to take a different approach on advertising porn on Tapas. There are two different approaches I can think of: being as unsubtle as possible or trying to trick people into going onto your site. From what I can see, you’ve taken the latter route, so let’s work with that.

Your usernames aren’t great, but they’ll do for now. Having the blank profile picture is kind of bad though. There isn’t a lot of people without blank profile pictures, especially commenters. This is where you could write a bot that steals screencaps off of Google images and put it into your profile picture. This isn’t “art theft”, and a lot of people do this already (look at half of the commenters of A Matter of Life and Death), so you’ll blend in. Looking at your website, it seems that your target audience is someone who knows English enough to use it in their day to day life, so making sure to have correct grammar is key. I’m assuming your bot functions sort of like a slot machine, putting random, preselected words in an order that should “in theory” work. Sadly, this is doesn’t work in practice, and what’s worse is that it’s such a quick fix! Your current way is 

“Hi dear friends/Hello dear friends. This cool/awesome/great work/story. Rate my cool/awesome/secret/private/hot stories collection [website]. (Look in browser)”. 

which is… fine, but it’s not the Tapas way for advertising comics on other people’s comment sections, which does happen (if you do that, or even worse, sub for sub, just stop). First of all, dear friends? What? Do you WANT to be outed as a robot? Just a simple “Hi!” or “Hey!” should do the trick. Tapas is not formal, in fact it is far from it, unless you define formal as “talking about your OTPs in the comment section”. Next, you’re so close! All you need is a “is a”! This IS A cool work. This IS A awesome story. This IS A great work. See! Sure, the awesome one is a bit off, but it’s fine, people make grammatical errors on the internet a lot. Next bit, rating? Who rates anymore? What is this, WEBTOON? Ew. Subscribe sounds much better. Next, stories collection? This is a comics site. Comics will do just fine. Finally, get rid of the look in browser. If you post a URL that can’t be clicked, people will just type it into their URL no matter what.

I should probably mention, I do not condone bot use. As I said at the start, it is very annoying thinking that you have someone else follow your comic only to see it’s just a bunch of bots. But it is interesting to see how zamaw advertise, and how just little things could make their advertisements more effective.

Now go back to your pesky YouTube comments to put your porn into the comments of racist 17 year old boys playing Minecraft and dropping slurs like it’s bananas in Mario Kart, zamaw. You might even get more clicks.