CIAYO Comics

» see ciayo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Indonesia built a comics internet in its own language, for its own artists, and none of it was addressed to anybody outside the country. That is the honest position I have on CIAYO. I found it in a sweep, not in my own history, and the only thing my history gives me here is knowing what a local scene looks like when it is running on people who are not being paid.

CIAYO Comics started in December 2016 under CIAYO Corp, created by Borton Liew, and it called itself the first national digital comic platform in Indonesia. The claim was fair. Indonesian comics had been living in the gaps since the print industry collapsed, and what existed was mostly artists posting to social media for nothing. CIAYO put up hundreds of titles, including work from the biggest local names of the period, and it paid for them.

That was the whole proposition. Reading was free and the artists still got money, which meant the company was carrying the entire cost of the relationship between the two. Around 160 people worked there. For a few years it was the thing you pointed at when somebody asked whether Indonesia had a comics industry left.

~ the case file ~

~ what it paid for ~

Paying creators up front is rare enough in webcomics that it deserves the sentence. Most platforms of that decade ran on the other model, where the site takes the hosting cost and the artist takes the risk, and the artist is told the audience is the payment. CIAYO inverted it and got a catalog no free-hosting site could have assembled.

The bill for that arrives every month whether readership grows or not. Advertising against comics in a market with low display rates does not cover a payroll of 160, and no amount of local goodwill turns into revenue on its own.

~ the slide ~

A subscription tier called Plus arrived about a year before the end, around thirty thousand rupiah for early chapters and no ads. It was the right idea introduced at the wrong point in the story, after four years of teaching an audience that this particular library cost nothing.

Traffic in the final months was thin. Reported visitors fell from around 55,000 in April 2020 to roughly 40,000 by June, numbers that sit oddly beside the monthly readership figures the company had been quoting, and the gap between those two sets of numbers is most of the explanation on its own. The announcement came on 30 July 2020 with no reason given. The site stayed up through August.

~ the long tail ~

What took the space was Webtoon, which had arrived in Indonesia with a vertical scroll built for phones and a Korean pipeline behind it deep enough to keep publishing whatever the local titles could not. Indonesian artists did not stop working. They just went back to being individuals on somebody else's platform, which is where they were before CIAYO and where most webcomics have always lived.

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