DONGMAN is an online comic platform exclusively co-operated by WEBTOON. DONGMAN provides digital comic reading services with the latest original stories in various genres, including romance, comedy, action, fantasy, and horror. It aspires to be a leading comic platform, home to thousands of creator-owned contents with amazing, diverse visuals from all over the world.

So far, DONGMAN has exceeded 10 million downloads and has more than 100 million logins.

With the increasing number of comics and readers online, it is crucial for DONGMAN to find the right books for the right readers in order to give them an enjoyable, personalized reading experience. Yet, the challenge of building such a complex recommendation system is very tough.

DONGMAN chose Alibaba Cloud's AIRec solution to quickly build up its recommendation service for the following reasons:
1. AIRec is a SaaS solution, with zero installation, development and deployment work. The plug and play solution ensures the project can go online within 6 weeks.
2. AIRec offers intuitive panels and reports for business users to quickly apply their operation policies, AB testing, and monitor business KPIs, such as CTR and CVR.
3. The core AI models and algorithms in AIRec are from the best practice of Alibaba e-commerce business with superior performance.

DONGMAN’s digital reading service is built on Alibaba Cloud with comprehensive computing and security services.

In terms of infrastructure, DONGMAN leveraged Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Object Storage Service (OSS) and Server Load Balancer (SLB) to provide essential computing, storage and network capabilities for a solid foundation. Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud's Relational Database Service (RDS), ApsaraDB for Redis and Mongo DB meets DONGMAN’s relational and NoSQL data management requirements with secure, elastic and superior performance.

The key component in this solution is Alibaba Cloud's AIRec. As the architecture diagram shows, AIRec uses DONGMAN’s desensitized data, item data and behavior data to train and refine the recommendation model. Once its ready, AIRec serves RESTful API for the front-end application to retrieve the recommendation results. Business users can also login to the AIRec control panel to create various recommendation scenarios, perform AB testing, adjust the algorithms, policies, and find actual business reports.

Notice: ApsaraDB for Redis and Tair have been merged and renamed to Tair (Redis® OSS-compatible) since September 2024.

DONGMAN hopes to grow its business further in the future by strengthening its cooperation with Alibaba Cloud.