Manga on Web

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

~ the goodbye ~

Shuho Sato had the kind of career that is supposed to make an artist grateful. Say Hello to Black Jack got him a television adaptation and Umizaru got turned into a film series that made a great deal of money for people who were not him. What he took out of it was a settled distrust of the contracts he had signed, and in February 2009 he put up a site under his own name to work out what selling comics without a publisher would actually look like.

The store opened on 31 March 2010 as 漫画 on Web. Readers bought points and points bought chapters, with the money landing on the artist instead of traveling down a licensing chain first. Other creators were invited in on the same terms, which turned a personal storefront into something closer to a magazine. It was renamed マンガ on ウェブ in 2017.

Direct sales stopped in November 2014. Sato converted the operation into an e-book publishing company and moved distribution onto Kindle and the other stores through a service called 電書バト. Four and a half years of running his own checkout had taught him that the hard part was never the drawing or the pricing. It was getting anyone to arrive at his address at all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the october giveaway ~

On 4 October 2010 Sato put every chapter of ブラックジャックによろしく online for free, with no registration and no account wall. He then let ITmedia print the results three weeks later, which is the part almost nobody does.

By 24 October the site had taken 400,000 new readers. About 3,000 of them registered, a conversion of roughly 1.3 percent. Point purchases ran into the low thousands, revenue passed 900,000 yen, and the month was on course for a million, the best the site had ever had. Sato's personal share of that was a little over 500,000 yen. He published all of it, the conversion rate included, which nobody on either side of the argument had been willing to do.

~ everybody else on the site ~

The same interview carried the figure that actually explains the next ten years. Sales for the other creators publishing on Manga on Web averaged a few thousand yen each, and in some cases did not cover the system fee the site charged them for being there. A platform built to prove that artists did not need a publisher had produced one artist who could live on it, and a tail of contributors paying for the privilege of a storefront.

~ reading it from outside ~

I read manga in translation, on paper, late, and rarely, which puts me outside this story in the way that counts: I was never going to be a paying subscriber to a Japanese-language comics site. What I can follow from here is the accounting. Anyone who has spent a decade watching platform cuts and app-store terms recognizes the argument Sato was having. He settled it the only way it can be settled, by printing his own ledger where both sides could read it.

~ issue twenty-four ~

The magazine ran to twenty-four issues. The last one went out on 1 January 2021, and the notice called it 休刊, a suspension rather than a closure, with poor sales given as the reason. The publishing arm outlived the magazine and Sato kept working, which is more than most self-publishing experiments of that decade managed.

The domain is where it ends. mangaonweb.com answers with 235 kilobytes of a broker's landing page today, in Japanese, offering the name for sale to whoever wants it.

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