Ever heard of Pareto's wealth distribution? Put simply, once upon a time a smart man from Italia Wilfried Fretz Pareto stated that "80% of total wealth is concentrated in 20% population!!" ...or something like that. That means those 20% people are rich or very rich, while the rest are either average, or below that. It's a winners take all situation, a very big problem.

Sounds bad? Well... here's worse: the superstar economy. Similiar, but now, instead of 20% people, it's now only friggin 1% !!! Those 1% will dominate and reap the most wealth, and the other 99%? Doomed. "Oh, but isn't it only happening in showbiz like Hollywood?? It's **SUPERSTAR** economy, right? " Haha nope. It's happening across wide spectrum of economy sectors. However this phenomenon is very, very visible in anything involving your household computers (your smartphone or your computer).

Starting from when you turn on your computer: the OS. For desktop computers, it's Microsoft with Windows, and the distant second would probably Apple with MacOS. They are the superstars, they take about all the profit. Only very few know Linux and co., and among them, very few is willing to spend money (which again goes to the superstars in this sector). Smartphone is even worse: either android or iOS, you choose. And then you go browsing the internet, for, maybe checking out the news. What do you use? Google Chrome. "HAHA Nice guess! but I use mint browser/uc browser/opera/vivaldi/duck/<insert your hip browser here>!" Sorry, they are all a skin of Chrome, unless you're using firefox, or you're on iPhone which is every internet browser is a skin of Safari.

Then you're probably opening a Slack/Discord. They're chrome underneath. Want to open Spotify? It's chrome underneath. Even Microsoft Edge is chrome underneath. Chrome here, chrome there, chrome chrome chrome. Where are the options other than Chrome? Firefox is barely surviving and the rest are already doomed to oblivion.

That's an example where there's only a small number of players. Let's take a look when there are millions. There are bazillions of apps already in appstore/Play store. Let's open it and bam. Count all the games and apps on the front page and wonder: "where the heck are the other millions??". They are buried. Tens or Hundreds screens deep. Those apps you find on the appstore are likely the superstars to certain extent, and they are probably raking in millions of dollars already. The rest? Suffers. Same goes to people on, say, instagram. Or youtube. Or recently, Tiktok.  Hundreds of millions are there, but only several hundred or thousands people that are busy putting paid product placements here and there, and maybe taking some portion of sharecropping with respective platforms.

Same goes with patreon. Tiny amount of people there can take a whopping >$1M per year, few others are in between $100k - $1m. And the rest are lucky enough to bring 2 patreons that happily donor $1. Also happening in gumroad, steam, and the list goes on. Superstar economy is happening about everywhere.

When a platform, says, take a percentage cuts as their revenue model (like patreon, playstore, app store, gumroad), what they usually do to take advantage of this phenomenon, to bring more profit? They make a superstar into an even bigger superstar. Why? It's often easier to milk mature cow than a bunch of calf, they say.

Some simple calculation shows it's more profitable to take 15% cut from 1 person making $1M (which is $150,000) than to take 15% cut from 500k people making $2 ($0.3 per person). Why? Because of rules and regulations, like tax or credit card processing or whatever particular countries quirky regulations, often making that $0.3 into $0. The others are "why gambling with contents from 500k people that people might not even like when we can get away with this content that is proven to be likable" and from there, recommender systems that are based around this getting more and more ubiquitous (and thus the concept "User Engagement", but really, it's just a sugarcoated term for "Addiction". Think tobacco).

Of course, it's pretty naive for a company to be dependent to 1 person, because if that one person leaves, the company collapses. So they're looking for, maybe hundreds of superstars. At this stage, they will put big effort to actually drawing some talent from the pool, paving the pathway for them into the fame. And when hundreds of those are already established, step two is to nurture them into even bigger superstars. And then they can leave the rest in the dust (basically, they will start to say "Who are you?! I don't care about you! I have these that I can milk already." albeit a bit more polite, like start to promoting those who already have thousands following only). At this point, they put fewer and fewer effort to taking care of newcomers. So... yeah. that's quite grim.

In 2019, and even stronger in 2020, I sniffed that this trend is also happening in independent webcomics publishing. Let's take a look at webtoon, especially since webtoon renamed their challenge league into discover and then into kanvas, and all they recommend are the same titles over and over and over again. They try to cloak traditional webcomic publishing (traditional by setting up your own blog / server like xkcd does) by slowly painting the stigma "This is the only way you can publish on the web now!" (only sharp-minded people can escape this). And then continually putting ads for their webtoon kanvas section, rebranding what originally was supposed to be some sort of audition into "your own publisher" (and with ad revenue and other incentive!). With money comes talents, and that leads to quite steep growth. I remember in 2016 there was still around 16k titles, and when I first posted Just Usual Days, there were around 80k. And now it's already over 120k(!) but they don't even bothered to remove questionable rating system and implemented much requested scheduling only recently. If you take a look at the recommended lists on the bottom of each comics you read there, you will keep seeing the same titles for each category. See the pattern here? The aroma is even sharper that there was a statement from webtoon itself that it wants kanvas to be "youtube for comics", and youtube relies heavily on this model (along with other revenue streams like spying you so you can get "relevant ads for you"). If anything stays like this, I expect that things get even murkier in the next 3 or 5 years or so, that new, young, naive, but bright artist step onto the land only to be dusted. When there are high enough of competing titles, discoverability will hit near zero, and people will start experimenting on various means to get some views. Just look at the ever increasing clickbait-y titles springing up every now and then. And that rating system will only bring chaos, evident in similiar ecosystem who implement star-rating system. Take a look at recent stream of frauds happening at Spotify, Amazon, Yelp, or maybe App stores. If Google were own webtoon, they will also take one step further by putting ad slots for fame.

This phenomenon is not exclusive on webtoon land. I only talk about webtoon because hey, currently they are the one who is dominating in indie comic publishing platform. Obviously, developing this economic model is not entirely wrong thing to do. It's perfectly reasonable from business perspective.

So yeah. Those are possibilities when people only know that webtoon is the only go to for publishing web comics, and competitors like this very platform, Webcomicsapp, graphite, globalcomics are forgotten. There are signs that will lead there, because these days people are increasingly cognitively lazy that it's fewer and fewer people discovering on their own. No ads no people coming, says Google (and facebook).

Honestly, I just hope that there's no single platform who would be dominating (because it's bad for me as a small creator lol). When webtoon is on the throne, I'm rooting for tapas or webcomicsapp or any other to impeach them. Same goes when tapas in on the throne. Fortunately, it's much cheaper to build an online comics platform than youtube (oh hello manga piracy sites), so expect there are also more and more platform sprung out. And hope more people will treat online comics platform like a fashion shop (they jump from one to another). And hope people will create a cross platform protocols to read comics that is understandable and easy to use by common people. There's a bit of hope actually.

Then if you ask me how to survive in this situation as a creator, there are 3 answers that I can pull out of my head: (1) Pray to be one of the superstars (2) Pray that the effort to nurture this economic model will fail (3) Freak out when (1) and (2) doesn't come true. Really. In the last year I crazily putting out episodes (3 days for 50 colored panels!!) and new titles after new titles was partly to anticipate this. "So that I won't really be dusted before the next upcoming years", I thought. Part others was to anticipate "so that if this title is going to fail, I know it sooner than having to wait for some other years to put out another title and the situation is already worse". Looks like this method do come with some prices though, like hurting my elbow lol. And it's not working I think.

So...uh...even I don't really know what to do. I just hope that either "YOU ARE MINE NOW" or "Babysitting Stegosaurus" will take off quite nicely. And then I can proceed to actually release my masterpiece out onto the wild later.

Phew. This chapter is kinda longer than usual rubbish I dump here. You are free to take this as an idea for your next big hit, if you are interested to take a shot at creating stories (I know you are ;)).

===SPOILER ALERT====

A variation of this phenomenon is taken for central theme for YOU ARE MINE NOW, believe it or not. That BL comics I'm making that's currently looks like nothing serious happening.

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