In June 2024, a comics company most Western readers had never heard of rang the Nasdaq bell. Webtoon Entertainment — the parent of Naver Webtoon, headquartered not in Seoul but in Los Angeles — priced its initial public offering at $21 a share, raised about $315 million, and stepped onto the U.S. market valued at roughly $2.67 billion [source: WEBTOON Entertainment, 2024]. Its pitch was startling in its scale: around 170 million people a month, it said, were reading comics on its apps across more than 150 countries [source: Reuters, 2024]. A few months later, a Korean webtoon-and-web-novel property called Solo Leveling swept the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards, taking Anime of the Year and eight other prizes — the first Korean-origin work to win the ceremony's top honor [source: Crunchyroll, 2025]. The vertical-scroll comic, a format born on Korean web portals two decades ago, had plainly gone global.
That is a real story, but it is not the whole story. In the same stretch of months, the company behind the IPO reported a widening net loss, and by late 2025 its monthly users were shrinking rather than growing [source: WEBTOON Entertainment, 2026]. The creators who draw these comics saw their average incomes fall even as industry sales climbed [source: Korea Times, 2024]. And a fight over generative AI was pulling readers, artists, and platforms in different directions [source: MIT Technology Review, 2025]. Understanding the webtoon boom means separating what has been measured from what is merely felt — and asking whether a genuinely new medium can also build a durable business around itself.
What exactly is a webtoon?
The word is a portmanteau of "web" and "cartoon," and the form is defined by a single design choice: you read it by scrolling straight down a phone screen, one tall vertical strip at a time, rather than turning pages. That may sound trivial, but it re-engineers comics for the device most of the world actually reads on. Panels are stacked in a continuous column; a moment of suspense can be paced by a long empty gap before the next image; color is standard rather than exceptional; and some apps layer in music or subtle animation. It is comics rebuilt natively for the smartphone, not print comics photographed and shrunk.
The format emerged in South Korea in the early 2000s, when web portals — Daum in 2003, Naver in 2004 — began hosting free vertical-scroll comics, part of a national tradition of printed comics known as manhwa. What turned a local experiment into a mass medium was the smartphone: once a high-resolution screen sat in every pocket, a thumb-friendly scroll was a better reading experience than any page-turn. The point of this article is not that the form is Korean — it is that a Korean solution to "how do comics work on a phone" turned out to travel remarkably well.
How a Korean format went global
Two corporate ecosystems carried the medium abroad, and it is worth being precise about which is which. The first is Naver Webtoon, reorganized under the U.S.-listed Webtoon Entertainment, whose flagship English-language app helped seed readerships in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The second is Kakao, whose Japanese arm Piccoma became the export success story that is easiest to measure: Piccoma surpassed ¥105 billion (about ₩900 billion) in transaction sales in 2024 and ranked as the single highest-earning app in Japan by annual consumer spending — across every category, games included — in both 2023 and 2024 [source: KED Global, 2025]. Japan, not the United States, is the largest webtoon market in the world.
The 2024 Nasdaq listing was the moment the medium's ambitions became a matter of public record. Filing to sell shares forced Webtoon Entertainment to disclose audited numbers rather than press-release enthusiasm, and it framed itself explicitly as a global platform: an American headquarters, a Korean engineering heritage, and a Japanese profit center. That structure is the real "globalization" of webtoons — not simply that readers abroad discovered Korean stories, but that the platforms reorganized themselves as multinational businesses listed in dollars.
The measured market versus the hype
Here the numbers demand care, because the feeling that webtoons are conquering the world is not the same as the measurement of how the business is performing.
Start with what is solidly measured. According to the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), the government body that surveys the sector, Korea's webtoon industry generated ₩2.189 trillion (about $1.36 billion) in 2023, up 19.7% from the year before — the first time the market cleared ₩2 trillion [source: KOCCA, 2025]. KOCCA's survey of overseas revenue found it concentrated in Japan (about 40%), followed by North America, Chinese-speaking markets, Southeast Asia, and Europe [source: KOCCA, 2025]. This is a real, sizeable, and internationally distributed industry, not a mirage.
Now the caution. That headline "170 million monthly active users" is a company-reported figure, and monthly active users count app openings, not paying readers — a large audience is not the same as a large profit. When Webtoon Entertainment reported audited results, the picture was more mixed than the user number suggests. Full-year 2024 revenue was about $1.347 billion, up roughly 12% in constant currency, and the company reached a second straight year of positive adjusted earnings; but it still posted a net loss of $152.9 million [source: WEBTOON Entertainment, 2025]. In 2025 the strain grew: revenue edged up only about 2.5% to roughly $1.4 billion, the net loss widened to $373.4 million, and adjusted earnings fell sharply [source: WEBTOON Entertainment, 2026]. Most tellingly for the "endless growth" narrative, the company disclosed that in the fourth quarter of 2025 its overall app monthly users declined about 6.5% year over year [source: WEBTOON Entertainment, 2026].
None of that erases the cultural rise, but it reframes it. The medium is genuinely global and genuinely large; the business of monetizing it is still unsettled, dependent on converting enormous free readerships into a much smaller base of people who pay per episode. A booming medium and a still-unprofitable platform are not contradictory descriptions — they describe two different questions.
From scroll to screen: the adaptation engine
If one thing has pushed webtoons into global mainstream awareness, it is what happens when they leave the app. Because a completed webtoon already contains characters, plot, and camera-like framing, platforms increasingly treat popular titles as intellectual-property incubators for film, television, and animation. Solo Leveling is the clearest recent case: it began as a Korean web novel, became a webtoon that the platform says has drawn on the order of 14.3 billion views, and was then adapted into the anime that dominated the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards [source: Crunchyroll, 2025]. On the live-action side, Netflix has built several series from Naver webtoons, including Sweet Home, adapted from the horror comic by Carnby Kim and Youngchan Hwang, which ran for three seasons.
Two cautions keep this honest. First, that "14.3 billion views" is an engagement metric reported by the platform, not a count of unique readers or a revenue figure; a view is a tap, and tallies like it are easy to quote and hard to independently verify. Second, it is tempting to draw a straight causal arrow — hit webtoon therefore hit show — but a popular source and a popular adaptation are better understood as a pipeline than as proof of causation. A large existing fandom lowers a studio's risk and marketing cost; it does not guarantee the adaptation succeeds, and plenty of well-read titles never break through on screen. The honest claim is narrower and still significant: webtoons have become a major feedstock for global screen IP, which is why studios and streamers now shop the apps for stories.
The people who draw them: creators and labor
Beneath the platform economics sits a labor question that the growth figures tend to obscure. The webtoon industry's total sales have risen for years — yet KOCCA's survey of creators found that the average annual income of artists who serialized in the past year fell to about ₩98.4 million, down ₩20.3 million from the previous year, even as those artists worked long hours [source: Korea Times, 2024]. In other words, a growing pie is not being shared evenly.
The likeliest explanation is structural rather than sinister: webtoon revenue is intensely top-heavy. A small number of blockbuster titles earn enormous sums while a long tail of series earns little, so aggregate industry growth and falling average creator income can be true at the same time. This is the same distribution trap that shows up across creator economies, from streaming music to video, and it means "the industry is booming" and "many creators are struggling" are not contradictory claims. It also sets the stakes for the technology fight described next, because anything that changes the cost of producing a webtoon lands directly on the people whose incomes are already under pressure.
The AI question
No issue divides the webtoon world more sharply than generative AI, and it is a case where a company's claim and a creator's fear must be represented side by side. Platforms see AI as a way to speed up labor-intensive steps — coloring, backgrounds, the in-between frames of an animation — and to lower costs. KOCCA's industry survey captured the split precisely: while about 63.8% of webtoon businesses said they planned to use AI, only 18.3% of surveyed artists reported having used generative tools, and just 36.1% intended to [source: Korea Times, 2025]. The producers are eager; the people holding the pen are wary.
Readers have entered the argument too. When fans of the Naver series The Knight King Returns with the Gods concluded that AI had been used to refine its art, they flooded it with low ratings in a coordinated protest in 2023 [source: MIT Technology Review, 2025]. Their objections were not only aesthetic. The deeper disputes are about consent and copyright — whether image models were trained on artists' work without permission — and about originality, the worry that a medium prized for distinctive drawing styles could flatten into a machine-smoothed sameness [source: MIT Technology Review, 2025]. There is a defensible case on each side: efficiency and lower barriers to entry against consent, authorship, and the value of a human hand. What there is not yet is a settled legal or ethical answer, in Korea or anywhere else, which is why platforms tend to describe their AI use cautiously while continuing to invest in it.
What to watch
The webtoon boom is neither the frictionless global takeover of the headlines nor a bubble about to burst. It is a genuinely new medium — comics rebuilt for the phone — that has found hundreds of millions of readers and a real, internationally distributed industry, while the business of turning that audience into durable profit remains a work in progress.
A few signals are worth watching. First, whether the platforms can convert their vast free readerships into paying subscribers fast enough to close the gap between rising revenue and widening losses, and whether that late-2025 dip in monthly users proves temporary or structural. Second, whether the adaptation pipeline deepens — more Solo Leveling-scale crossovers would strengthen the case that webtoons are a primary global IP source, not a novelty. Third, whether creator incomes and contract terms improve, or whether the top-heavy distribution hardens into a permanent divide. And fourth, how the AI fight is resolved in law and in practice, since the answer will shape both who makes webtoons and how they look. Whatever the numbers do next, the more durable fact may be the simplest one: a way of reading comics invented for the smartphone has become, quietly, one of the most widely read storytelling formats on earth.