Venus Cheng
English 10
17 September 2020
Mr. Barazzoul
Analysis of “Webtoon”
Webtoon, a combined word of “web” and “cartoon” is one of the biggest and most popular platform in the web-comics world where digital artists can publish their webtoon and share their stories. Webtoon has approximately 64+ million monthly active users, and 16.5+ million of user reading it every single day. Webtoon is not only in one language but in multiple languages such as English, Chinese(traditional and simplified), Spanish, French and Indonesian. Because of that, webtoon has growth so much recently in this few years. In June 2020, Global page views (not including Korea) reached around 1.5 billion page view for the first time, and increased around 40% at the same time. Some webtoon also has some cool effects such as flash, gif animations, and background music which makes it more interesting. Some webtoon stories even turned into a drama due to the population. It has a whole lot of genres, from drama to supernatural, anything you can think of. Webtoon was created in South Korea by JunKoo Kim. However, It was first”created by… Daum in 2003 and was known as Daum Webtoon. In 2004, Naver followed Daum’s example and started Naver webtoon” (Grace 2019). Later, they also made Line Webtoon which is under Line, which is under Naver. Webtoon is also very popular around the age of 12-20+, “users under the age of 24 take up about 75 percent of the share of total users in North America. The Line Webtoon application also ranked 4th among the iOS entertainment apps”(Park Ji-hoon 2020). Webtoon has around $100 million of net worth, around 10-100 employees and more than 2000+ original creators.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/webtoon-reaches-six-years-of-us-operations-301099687.html
https://webtoonscorp.com/en/
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2020/02/27/nationalGuestReports/Sponsored-Report-Naver-Webtoon-riding-high-on-the-Korean-Wave/3074326.html