**Note: In this article, the word webtoon as a medium will be indicated in italics. The word Webtoon, refers to the company and platform developed by Naver Webtoon. It will be capitalized without italics.
INTRODUCTION
The comics industry is undergoing a digital revolution without the forces of giant publishers Marvel or DC. It is being led by big tech, big-data, and its intermediation between audiences and individual creators. At the center of this global revolution is a popular app: Webtoon. Webtoon currently outpaces its competitors by an order of magnitude with 50 million+ downloads in the United States. Its parent company, Naver, plans to secure a majority stake the digital future of comics consumption. In June 2021, Naver acquired the popular user-generated content writing platform Wattpad for $600 million and formed Wattpad-Webtoon Studios to create a fully vertical transmedia entertainment production company for its audience of 166 million global users. In October 2021, Webtoon announced a partnership with DC comics to produce Batman: Wayne Family Adventures. The webtoon gained a readership of over 650,000 subscribers in its first month, well outpacing the monthly readerships of Marvel and DC’s best selling monthly print comics, with a readership of 149,060 and 116,000, respectively.
Webtoons differ from their print predecessors. Heekyoung Cho argues that the webtoon can be classified as its own distinct medium of narrative consumption based on its style of vertical scroll format and system of user-generated content, open solicitation of material, free distribution, amateur contribution, and active communication between readers and users. Webtoons have evolved to become a central form of cultural production in Korea that provides low-cost and rapid generation of IP content to seed film, gaming, and television. By highlighting the interaction between Korean cultural policy and dynamics of digital platformization, this two-part article addresses the question: In Webtoon’s platform-driven dynamic of agents, who generates value for whom and when?
WEBTOONS 101: The Basics and History
Webtoon history begins in the early 2000’s in South Korea as an extension to the popular search engine browsers Naver and Daum. At the onset, participation in “webtooning” was open platform; amateur cartoonists and professionals alike uploaded their cartoons and maintained a profile page. The early webtoons were similar to digital comics around the world. They maintained a variety of formats ranging from scans of print comics to comics incorporating multimedia elements including music, flash animation, and layouts that could only be achieved on a digital desktop screen. As this emerging medium developed into the mid 2010’s, webtoons slowly shifted to a specific format that incorporated a vertical scroll to advance a webtoon’s narrative. The first webtoon to feature this new format was Love Story by Kang Full in 2003, which was featured on Daum’s portal and on the artist’s personal website.
In Korea, readership of Love Story skyrocketed, reaching up to 2 million visitors per day. Shortly after the comic was adapted into a variety of transmedia productions, It was adapted to print in 2004, a theatrical play in 2005, and a feature film in 2008. The flexible reincarnation strategies of webtoons havebecome a defining feature of the medium in Korea and the United States. Popular webtoons cultivate a following on their platforms and provide a storyboard-like visual narrative that can be presented as film and games. Thus, webtoons serve as a monetizable, low-cost form of piloting and preproduction for more resource-intensive forms of entertainment production. In 2009, Naver released a mobile app and in 2013, Daum released its mobile app in Korea, paving the way for pocket-read comics to reach millions of readers around the world.
Webtoons has proved to be a successful preproduction strategy for the development of diverse media. To attract more webtoon creators (and thus potential audience members), Naver launched the Challenge League as a promotional system for amateur webtoonists. Using the platform, any cartoonist could upload and publish their webtoon. Paid webtoonists were given priority and marketing support in the official part of the app, while legions of amateur cartoonists shared their webtoon to potentially capture a segment of Webtoon’s audience. When amateur webtoons climbed the ranks of the Challenge League, they would be promoted into different tiers that offered greater visibility on the platform. The 1% dream for webtoonists was to become an official publication of the platform, which yielded monthly payments. The most popular webtoon creators in this tier earned as much as $888,000 in a year.
By 2014, both Naver and Daum began to globalize their efforts. In 2014, Daum commissioned Tapas, an American-based company, to feature their webtoons, and Naver launched Line Webtoon (now Webtoon) as platforms to engage with international audiences. Since its global launch, Naver’s Webtoon app has skyrocketed in popularity, capturing a dominant share of the market. While these two companies were pioneers the industry, they took divergent strategies in audience cultivation. Daum was an early adopter of the monetization process, where locked content could be unlocked in the form of micropayments that gave up to 90% royalities to the creator. This method proved to be lucrative for both the platform and for webtoonists. Naver opted for a different strategy, subsidizing consumption by offering their webtoons for free, capitalizing on scaling their audience. Webtoonists could earn a share of the ad revenue generated on the platform, and in 2019, after capturing the bulk of the market, Webtoon began to charge readers to read popular webtoons.
PLATFORM OVERVIEW
With over 50 million downloads in the United States, Naver Webtoon has far surpassed the competition in market share of webtoons as visualized by the infographic. Over 580,000 creators have contributed amateur comics to date. With a large audience and active user base, this platform has the largest potential for a webtoonist to find audiences for their content.
The platform features monetized and free Original comics, as well as a large portion of free-to-read comics on their Canvas page. Purportedly, the app uses an algorithm series to recommend content to readers based on user preferences and audience engagement. However, considering the diversity genres and styles of content available when searching the app, content that fits a limited genre palette is often recommended. This narrow set of content suggestions indicates a possible lack of accuracy and bias of the recommendation system’s algorithm.
The Webtoon platform homepage features a billboard header advertising Webtoon Originals. Below, it shows a listing of the series to which the viewer has subscribed, followed by a listing of Originals. On the Originals page, viewers can sort by upload date and genre. All Webtoon Originals series receive sponsorship directly from the platform to publish weekly updates in addition to ad revenue share.
Webtoons home page. Screenshot by author.
In the Canvas Section, readers can view the various titles uploaded by amateur creators. Amateur webtoons that have either an active engagement or receive an editor’s pick are featured in the spotlight section, boosting visibility of the comic across the entire audience base. Readers are able to scroll through rankings or search directly for a webtoon. Once a webtoon is opened, a reader can choose to subscribe to it, which bookmarks it for future reading. Amateur webtoons in Canvas that have over 40,000 monthly visits are eligible for the ad-revenue sharing program and are more likely to be promoted as an original series.
Webtoons Canvas section. Screenshot by author.
When a webtoon title is selected, the screen opens to a menu of the episodes for a given webtoon that can be opened and read on the screen by scrolling down. Note that in Canvas, creators have a degree of formatting freedom, and webtoon formats do not need to follow the standardized scroll-down forms of Original Series.
Webtoons Original Series page. Screenshot by author.
After conclusion of reading a webtoon chapter, the platform will make recommendations to the reader. However, it seems that there is a discrepancy between what webtoons are recommended and the content and style of the webtoon read. This may either be an algorithm inefficiency or bias that aids in determining which styles and genres of Webtoons gain organic readership growth on the platform vs. which do not.
Webtoons recommendation page. Screenshot by author.
CONCLUSION
This article has provided a basic introduction to webtoons and the medium’s industry-leading platform Webtoon. Webtoons as a medium rose in the Kim Daejung period and integrated the rising interconnected community of Korean citizens with a revitalized perspective of comics. Webtoons have provided a new space for the rapid development of transmedia IP, and provide a potential opportunity for cartoonists to leverage their comics to large digital audiences. Guided by Korea’s cultural policy for exporting domestic content to a global audience, Webtoon intermediates a dynamic system of agents ranging from audiences, creators, publishers, advertisers, and governments. In such a system of dynamic players, there appears to be a discrepancy between content that is rapidly promoted through the platform and the overall diversity of content supplied through the user-generated Canvas component. Further research will explore the Webtoon platform in order to answer the question:
How do content generators incorporate Webtoon into their professional practice and to what measures of success?