The Move Online

Chapter 2 ended with print comics and no clear account of their decline. This chapter follows the other half of the story: the web portals that began carrying comics, the competition between them, and the model that made webtoons free to read. Here the sources say much more, but they also contradict each other more, and some passages are loosely written. The chapter reports both.

Portals and "Bait"

The Webtoon (platform) article says webtoons began as "a sub-menu of the gate companies that began with South Korean portal services Daum and Naver". Its explanation of the business is blunt: "portal sites gathered a large online audience by offering digital comics as bait". It says Naver's site "started in 1999, but it initially had a muted response as a hidden menu", and that Naver then "placed webtoons in premium advertising spaces worth 300 million Korean won on its portal surface", which "significantly increased their traffic". The article's conclusion is that "the key to their success in the portal market was digital comics". That is the article's reading of the strategy, and it names no source for the 300 million won or for the traffic claim.

The Main Players

The Free Model, and How It Earned

The articles describe several revenue ideas, in the order they say they came:

1. Traffic first. Free comics bring readers to a portal, and the portal earns elsewhere. The platform article says Naver's influx of readers "brought in significant income through search keywords, exceeding the revenue from selling comics". Its figure for the cost per keyword is garbled ("26,000 to 4,000 Korean Won"), so I do not repeat it.
2. Ads on episodes (2008). Naver "introduced ads on webtoons, but they did not fairly share the ad revenue with artists", per the article, which does not say who judged it unfair.
3. Paying for episodes. The Webtoon article lists models: a limited set of chapters free and the rest charged; or a daily limit on free chapters. Kakao Page's "free if you wait" lets readers see an episode free after a time delay. The platform article says Naver adopted Lezhin's "Time Delay" model in 2013.
4. Revenue share (2013). "In 2013, Webtoon launched Page Profit Share (PPS), which offered the artist a share of the advertising revenue for the first time."
5. Selling rights. The platform article says Naver "absorbed the electronic publication rights of Korean artists for a small fee", and that international rights were later obtained. Later the business model "expanded to include paid content sales, advertising revenue, and IP business revenue".

Figures that don't add up

The platform article says that when Webtoon launched in 2013 its programmes "generated 23.2 billion won" and that by 2022 they had grown to "2.25 trillion won (USD $1.69 billion), an increase of more than 87 times". Dividing 2.25 trillion by 23.2 billion gives about 97, not 87. It may be that the figures are from different measures, but the article does not say. The same article elsewhere says "the platform was founded in 2005" and launched in 2004, and says a 2013 date for its own "launch".

Piracy

The platform article says "in 2012, Naver did not participate in the legal crackdown on illegal sites that had been pirating their content for eight years", and that the first legal action was against a frame-link piracy site. The wording is unclear, and the claim of "eight years" implies piracy from about 2004. Chapter 7 returns to piracy.

Where the Article Turns to Criticism

The same history section goes on to criticise the system. It says many aspiring creators submitted free comics, that "the influx of free content was guaranteed as long as they were not part of the 0.1% that received a formal serialization", that freelance creators "could not unite", and that the vertical-scroll method "demand[ed] over 100 cuts, which strained artists' health". It adds that one Kakao Webtoons artist "died at the age of 37 due to overwork" and that "the BBC reported on artists suffering from severe labor and exploitation". I report these as the article's claims. The passage gives no figures or sources I could see, the 0.1% has no source, and the death is unnamed here. I did not read the BBC report. Chapter 8 takes up creators' pay and conditions with whatever sources I can find, and I do not treat this passage as established fact.

Going Global, and a Sign of Change

On 2 July 2014 the Line Webtoon site and app launched worldwide (platform article). Naver chose 42 webtoons, including Noblesse, Tower of God and The God of High School, plus one by an American artist, for English at launch. Its "Canvas" section lets artists self-publish and be paid by page views.

The Kakao Webtoon article gives a later and different picture: it says that since October 2024 Kakao "began to shut down Webtoon services globally due to the decline in popularity and financial difficulties", starting with the Taiwanese, Thai and Indonesian versions in 2025, and that on 22 September 2026 Kakao announced it would "shut down Tapas and merge Kakao Webtoon into KakaoPage by the end of 2026". This is a recent and short statement with no source visible, and I could not check it. If it is right, the market of the 2010s has already changed, and the picture in this course is of a medium still moving.

Reading a Platform Claim

1. What kind of "first"? Platform, service, word, format and global launch are different firsts.
2. Whose number? A market share, a revenue or a growth multiple needs an owner, a year and a check on the arithmetic.
3. Promotion or analysis? The article moves between a history, a business explanation and sharp criticism within a few paragraphs. Notice which register a sentence is in.
4. Is it current? Platform news dates quickly.

Exercises

Next chapter: How a Webtoon Works, which covers the vertical-scroll format, weekly release, production roles and studios, and how discovery and earnings are described.