How WEBTOON Became a Storytelling Powerhouse for the Streaming Era

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.

In early 2015, the webcomics platform Inkblazers shut down, leaving young comic book creator uru-chan looking for a new digital platform to host her stories. Based out of Massachusetts, uru-chan was a lifelong fan of manga and anime, with a lot of these storytelling aesthetics informing her own stories, from the character designs to adding magical realism and quirky humor to memorable characters trying to find their way. 

Uru-chan chose to start publishing her work on the South Korean webcomics platform WEBTOON, beginning with her series OFR – Ice in June 2015. In deciding to publish through WEBTOON, uru-chan’s life and career were forever changed.

The WEBTOON Advantage

Fans were drawn to her fantasy tale of a misfit thief finding love, and her expressive characters, and uru-chan’s readership and exposure to global audiences exploded exponentially, with OFR – Ice being read by over 1.4 million unique user impressions and tens of thousands of WEBTOON users subscribing to the series. 

Her follow-up WEBTOON series, the ongoing title unOrdinary, which launched in 2022, has seen even greater success on the platform, clocking in impressively with over 1.3 billion unique user impressions and over 6 million subscribers.

“When I started with WEBTOON, they gave each new title a shoutout,” uru-chan tells Den of Geek magazine. “They already had a pretty decent audience, around 500k, at the time when I joined in 2016. When I first launched, they would send a push-button notification or email to any subscriber. Immediately, my audience shot from a couple thousand subscribers to around 50k. You’re not going to get an audience like that anywhere else.”

A Digital Platform to Tell Stories Worldwide

For the uninitiated, WEBTOON is a digital comics platform founded by Junkoo Kim in 2004. Kim continues to serve as the digital platform’s CEO as it expands its international reach and branches into other forms of mass media. Since then, the term “webtoon” has become synonymous with South Korean digital comics, particularly webcomics formatted to be more intuitively read on mobile devices through a vertical scroll presentation. WEBTOON has spread into other readership markets around the world, growing to have a user base numbering well over 85 million worldwide and becoming the biggest webcomics platform in the United States.

Under Kim’s leadership, WEBTOON steadily began to grow its overseas and foreign-language presence with the launch of its international platform in July 2014, allowing overseas artists to upload their works to the site. Studio interest increased in its properties, the publisher created WEBTOON Studios in November 2020, playing an even more active role as WEBTOON titles were adapted into both live-action and animated film and television projects. If you’ve watched the live-action horror series Sweet Home and the gritty K-drama Itaewon Class on Netflix, or popular anime shows like Tower of God and Noblesse on Crunchyroll, then you’re familiar with WEBTOON stories. 

For Kim, WEBTOON is built on the underlying principle that people around the world each have their own stories to tell and that WEBTOON gives them the opportunity to share their stories with audiences globally. “Everyone in the world has their own stories; it all started from that belief. 

I thought they had that need to share their stories and that they wanted to share them,” Kim explains. “Individual creators not only feed into the volume of the content, but I believe that it will be high quality. In that process, I thought that we could attain a strong diversity of content. I believe that a diversity of content is very critical.”

Adapting WEBTOON Titles for the Screen

WEBTOON titles have steadily been optioned by television and film studios around the world, including Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, Netflix, and Skybound Entertainment; 50% of Netflix Korea’s original projects produced in 2023 were based on various WEBTOON properties. These aren’t confined to a single genre, either. From the feudal zombie-horror series Kingdom to the hard-hitting crime show Bloodhounds or even the coming-of-age romantic drama Love Alarm, some of Netflix’s biggest shows in the past few years have been based on WEBTOON stories. Whether you’re into zombies or period-piece romance stories, WEBTOON’s extensive library of titles includes all kinds of genres. Still, Kim and WEBTOON are very careful about entrusting adaptations to the right multimedia partners.

“It’s not just simply a business for us. This is a content business. Because of that, if you’re just looking at how to make money, that doesn’t work. You need to be really good at adapting that IP,” Kim observes. This distinction carries far beyond licensing titles to Netflix andCrunchyroll—it also extends to creative partnerships with American comic book companies like Marvel Entertainment and video game studios such as Ubisoft. WEBTOON publishes the official Assassin’s Creed tie-in comic, Assassin’s Creed: Forgotten Temple. Even the mega-popular K-pop band BTS has partnered with WEBTOON, releasing original comics on the platform that blend urban pop fantasy with classic Korean mythology.

Not Just Global Players

With this attention to quality and reader data in mind, Kim notes that the WEBTOON platform sends a message to storytellers and readers about its long reach and accessibility. The extensive audience and scope have consistently proved to creators that WEBTOON is unmatchable in its readership scale. This symbiotic dynamic has propelled the platform to its strong market position.

“It’s not simply that we want to show ourselves as global players,” Kim explains. “I think the message is clear to our readers: Through us, you can reach global audiences and, through real-time transactions, we can distribute it globally. This really showed the creators that it’s possible and really reinforced our No. 1 market position.”

This axiom has since proved especially true for uru-chan, a young comic book creator on the other side of the world from Kim, who started out telling her own stories through webcomics online. What she discovered in publishing her work on WEBTOON, with its steadily expanding international reach, would change her life and career.

The Endless Creative Possibilities of WEBTOON

One of the factors of WEBTOON’s success is its overall presentation: not only is it optimized for reading through desktop and laptop computers, but it’s also presented in a vertical scroll that makes it easy to follow along and read on mobile devices. After years of reading traditional comics and manga, along with publishing on other webcomics platforms prior to WEBTOON, uru-chan was quickly surprised by how WEBTOON’s presentation could expand her digital canvas. This expansion led to a greater sense of creative freedom, as uru-chan could let her imagination and visuals grow significantly on this platform.

“It wasn’t until I was working with WEBTOON that I realized how limitless the layout is because it’s an endless scroll. You can draw pictures as big as you want them,” uru-chan notes. “That’s not a jab at manga, but manga is a bit more restrictive when it comes to page layouts and stuff like that. You have to plan a lot more ahead of time whereas, with WEBTOON, you have a lot more freedom.”

While the rapid growth in her readership can certainly be overwhelming, uru-chan is careful to stay focused on her work and not allow the pressure of having a large global audience actively affect her creative process. Instead, uru-chan sees the high level of fan support she has received as motivation to continue honing and improving her storytelling talents.

“I think the big thing that I’ve learned in the past eight years is to continue to focus on my craft and continue to write the best stories that I can,” uru-chan reflects. “It’s about staying grounded and grateful for having such a big audience as you’re continuing to write stories—and doing the best that you can with stories so that the audience can enjoy it.”

A Landmark Year for the Platform

As uru-chan continues to tell stories and reach readers globally through WEBTOON, the company—and Kim—have achieved an enormous milestone in the organization’s history. On June 27, 2024, WEBTOON officially began its listing on the NASDAQ, marking its full Wall Street stock market debut. 

This multi-billion dollar launch is the successful culmination of much of Kim’s vision for WEBTOON, but the industrious founder and CEO is not looking to slow down his growth plans any time soon.

“With the power of diversity and the power of content, I was able to gather creators and go viral. Hopefully, after going public, I’ll be able to accelerate this. In five years, or maybe further ahead into the future, I want all of the world’s creators to be able to share their storytelling content on WEBTOON. I want them to pick WEBTOON as their No. 1 preference,” Kim declares. “As a platform business, this is the North Star for us, being the first pick for creators. I think the business result of that is that all entertainment players throughout the world ask WEBTOON for IP to develop into films. I want all entertainment players to contact WEBTOON for their IP for their entertainment business. I want us to be their first pick. That is our North Star!”