The internet is full of great comics created specifically for children, but young readers don’t have any way to find them. After all, there is no children’s room on the internet. But Brian Leung is hoping to solve that problem with Kidjutsu, a site that collects kid-friendly webcomics and displays them using an easy-to-use online comics viewer. Kidjutsu offers comics in a variety of genres and age levels, and while many will be unfamiliar to new readers, established creators like Sarah Ellerton (Inverloch) and Shaenon Garrity (Li’l Mell) have also signed on.
Leung, who has two degrees from MIT and worked in artificial intelligence research at Microsoft, made it a point to keep his comics viewer simple in order to make it as easy as possible to use. “I spent a lot of time on performance, getting it to load quickly,” he said. “That is one of the problems I have seen with other readers: There are a lot of bells and whistles, but the main comics reading experience is horrible.”
The viewer is also embeddable, so fans can import the webcomics to their own websites. Leung is not worried that this will divert traffic from Kidjutsu. “I am going to be introducing in-comic ads eventually, so it will be OK if they were not on my site but using my reader,” he said. “We would still generate some ad revenue from it. But the embeddable reader is really just to spread the comics. That’s the main purpose.” Leung hopes creators will adopt his viewer on own their sites as well.
While newcomers to Kidjutsu can jump right in and start reading, the site will prompt them to sign up after they view a certain number of comics. Signing up allows the reader to comment on comics and vote for favorites. Registration is free, and Leung has no plans to charge for content, but he wants to see the readers get engaged in a dialogue with creators and each other. Ultimately, he said, he would like to see the site become a social network along the lines of Crunchyroll. “I want this to be the place where the kids are going to read comics and the creators come to get feedback,” he said.
Why would a creator who already has a website put his or her work on Kidjutsu? To be seen, Leung said, and perhaps to earn a little extra money as well. “We have an ad profit sharing model where we share up to 70 percent of the ad profit,” he said, although the site hosts only a handful of unobtrusive ads at the moment. The site also brings new readers, of course. “Our contract is a nonexclusive one, and they can take down the comics at any time,” said Leung. “When I look at it from the creators’ shoes, I don't see any reason not to do this.”
At the moment, Leung is moderating the site, and he invites creators in one by one. “When they decide they are interested and want to upload, I already know what kind of content is in their comic, so it’s automatic,” he said. In the future, he plans to ask creators to rate their own comics according to a number of different criteria: violence, nudity, language, sexual explicitness.
In order to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), parents must register for children under 13. Leung’s future plans include a set of parental filters that parents can change to meet their own preferences when they register
Leung says the site is currently drawing traffic “in the low tens of thousands per month,” and his first priority is to build an audience of fans who will keep coming back. “For a site supported by ads to succeed, you need to not only bring in new visitors but also get those visitors to stay for a long time,” he said. He recently added a number of features, such as bookmarks, that make the site more useful for repeat visitors.
“I want readers to be able to do things like share this comic with their friends, go easily from one chapter to another, or go to a recommended book that’s similar to this book,” he said. “While I’m doing that, I am going to be experimenting with monetization to get the ads to perform well. I call that closing the engagement loop: You get visitors coming in and you want them to continuously see the site. The more they use the site, the more ads they will see, and the more we will make.”
