WEBTOON Establishes Itself as Global Storytech Platform with 180 Million Users in Its First Five Years
WEBTOON Establishes Itself as Global Storytech Platform with 180 Million Users in Its First Five Years
WEBTOON Establishes Itself as Global Storytech Platform with 180 Million Users in Its First Five Years
- WEBTOON is the only global storytech platform that has both an amateur content model and an original content model, with both showing promising results in Korea and abroad
- In its first five years, the storytech platform has expanded its digital comic ecosystem around the world, exceeding over KRW 1 trillion in annual transactions
- WEBTOON has helped to enhance its creator environment and drive its growth with leading AI technologies for digital comics
2022-05-02
WEBTOON is celebrating the fifth anniversary of its spin-off from NAVER in May 2017, following its establishment as a company-in-company in 2015.
In its first five years, WEBTOON expanded its story-tech platform globally, following success in its domestic market, Korea. The key to WEBTOON’s success is a platform that encompasses both an amateur content model where anyone can post creations and an original content model where standard digital comics are published. Both have shown promising results in Korea and abroad.
As a result, WEBTOON reached 180 million[1] global monthly active users (MAU) as of March 2022, from 46 million in 2017 when the company was spun off from NAVER. Currently, there are more than 82 million users using NAVER WEBTOON (Korea), LINE MANGA (Japan), LINE WEBTOON (Southeast Asia) and WEBTOON (the Americas and Europe).
WEBTOON has pioneered the digital comics format in global markets and now offers them in 10 languages around the world, with an audience that stretches from Japan and Southeast Asia to Europe and the Americas. Its continuous discovery and nurture of local talents and development of a vigorous creator ecosystem has helped to overcome cultural barriers. There are now approximately 6 million creators on the global WEBTOON platform and its webnovel affiliate Wattpad, with more than 1 billion works of content available to readers.
WEBTOON has established digital comics and webnovels as key trending intellectual properties (IP) in the global entertainment market with a platform where creators and readers can communicate. Its robust business model and highly sophisticated IP value chain also encourage adaptation of original content to other entertainment mediums. As a result, WEBTOON’s annual transaction amount has jumped from KRW 240 billion (approx. USD 183 million) in 2017 to KRW 1.5 trillion (approx. USD 1.14 billion) in 2021.
In addition, WEBTOON has helped to enhance its creator environment with leading AI technology developments, such as ‘AI Painter’ for an automatic coloring service and ‘Toon Radar’ for copyright protection.
“WEBTOON is now the global No. 1 storytech platform, used by 180 million people, and is the top destination in global entertainment to find great stories,” wrote Kim Jun-koo, WEBTOON founder and global CEO, in his five-year anniversary message to employees. “We look forward to even more growth opportunities in the next five years than we had in the first five years.”
[1] Number of global storytech platform users from WEBTOON global, Wattpad and eBOOK Japan
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