Tapas Shutdown: Digital Ownership Disaster — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] There's never been a better reason to pirate anything right now than this right here. What do you mean that you just sold money from everybody, all your users, left them high and dry, saying that you will not allow them to maintain the stuff they purchased on a different platform or service,

[00:15] and then on top of that, you killed off multiple massive mobbed-up piracy sites for no reason, now that you're exiting out of the West and leaving thousands, or part of thousands of creators high and dry

[00:30] with no ability to know what they're going to do next to be able to make money. Insane. But it gets even worse than this. You literally have it to where the founder of Tarpis that sold the company to Cow Cow straight up says that before he sold it in 2021,

[00:44] the actual company was making $40 million per year. It was profitable until it was sold to Cow Cow in 2021. Like, how do you run a $40 million cash cow into the ground in the early 2020s?

[00:59] Like, let me outline this, because I think this is the most important thing. Like, there's a lot of crazy shit with this story right now, but this one is really insane. Like, everybody knows how insane internet culture with anime manga, webcomics, cartoons, manga, and everything exploded in the 2020s.

[01:15] And there's a lot of, too, a lot of bad things, yes. But just strictly speaking, in terms of an explosion of popularity and income and revenue, it should be astronomically higher than, for instance, when it was sold in 2021.

[01:29] Because honestly, the reason why we know this is COVID. Everybody's locked inside for a very long time. And basically the overall flow and activity online really started to you know kind of wade and disappear slightly like around in 2024 2025 but even then the levels of internet

[01:45] activity and anime, manga, webcomics, and webtoons, you know, they're in a higher level of popularity than they ever have been, honestly, ever in the history of their creation, and, you know, the fact that ProCal could run this company, pop this into the ground in

[01:59] five years when in all kinds of purposes it should be making at their very baseline slightly above 40 million shows how bad they are at managing companies this is legitimately insane it is

[02:14] actually insane how they ran topics into the ground like this it is disrespectful but obviously there is so much more I want to talk about so I want to talk about how users are going to be losing access to all their content.

[02:28] So basically, anyone that has purchased legal content, once again, proving what piracy is, superior, you just bought a license. And now, all that content

[02:40] that you bought, if you have spent hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, whatever, even ten dollars, that money is a waste. They just took that all from you, pocketed it, and you cannot keep the stuff that you purchased. That series you

[02:54] bought, you wanted to read, you wanted to support the author or artist, well, too bad. Too bad. You no longer have access to that content upcoming in March of next year. Too bad. You cannot transfer your ownership as well to another platform.

[03:07] It has been confirmed in a press release that the users that have unlocked content on Tapas cannot transfer it to another Kakao service or platform So basically you screwed All that money you might as well put it in a wood chipper or just a paper shredder That what you did because you just

[03:23] lost access to everything you bought and that is ridiculous how a company can do this. This is the future of what Sony, what Crunchyroll, what Netflix, what every digital company offers you a

[03:35] platform on the internet. What they want to do to you. They want to make you pay astronomical prices for a game a movie, a TV show, whatever it may be, you pay these absurd prices that are way higher

[03:49] than a physical copy, whatever, and they can just take it away from you in a year or two years later. They can just rip it from you and you cannot access it anymore. And that is so freaking evil.

[04:02] It's evil. You will own nothing and you will be happy. That is what these companies literally live by. And then they get pissed when people pirate, when people decide to say, screw these companies, I'm just going to pirate things.

[04:15] Why would I want to give money to a company that won't even let me keep the stuff that I pay for? That's literally what they have just done to people. This is so unbelievably gross to me. It is actually insane.

[04:28] Like, this is, honestly, they might be worse than Crunchyroll. they actually might be worse or at the very least on the same level of evil.

[04:40] Like, Crenshaw technically has taken people's money as well. Right Stuff is a good example. When they, you know, took over Right Stuff they dishonor their promises of giving people the stuff they paid for with Right Stuff and just screwed them over But this one is on a different level because like how do you run a company into the ground you don let your authors and artists know on your platform in advance that you doing this you just leave them behind and dry and then now you taking everybody stuff away from them what this indirectly is going to do is cause a backlash effect where people are not going to even want to pay for the series that they already been paying for like I want to give a very good example of this because this is how I would feel if I was let say buying a series like for instance the beginning after the end okay and I was supporting it

[05:22] for years, okay? And I spent like a lot of money buying these chapters or supporting the service or whatever and then it was just taken from me and I can no longer go back and look at these chapters when I want anymore legally.

[05:34] I would just say, screw it. Why would I ever want to pay for something again with the series or any of these series where they could just be taken from me? And I would eat for those higher sites. That's exactly what I would do. And I don't think anyone could fault someone

[05:46] for that. Because if you do this to someone, you can't blame them They just don't want to deal with your service anymore. Like, piracy is a service issue, and that's what this is. This is 100% a service issue, and it's taken me to my core

[05:59] that Botto and a bunch of other piracy sites died for basically nothing. Like, if these companies like Friends of Kalkal would have invested in Topps after taking down, you know, piracy sites and trying to make it better, I'd be like, okay, it sucks, but, you know, at the same time, you know,

[06:13] okay, you're trying to improve your platform. But this showcase is just what they are like. They're not about trying to improve their services. They're just trying to make as much money as possible, cut costs as much as possible, and then leave people high and dry.

[06:25] It's just, it's gross, dude. It's really gross. I have nothing else really to say. I'm just, I'm going to leave it at that. You all have a blessed day on that, wherever you live. Leave a like if you enjoyed the video. Chidi out.