Sponsored by Tapas Entertainment
Kakao Entertainment, the content subsidiary of Korea’s leading IT company Kakao, is the parent company of Tapas Entertainment – the main sponsor for the site you’re reading. But what is Kakao? The simple answer is that it’s a multifaceted tech company – and through its global entertainment subsidiary Kakao Entertainment, it stands at the forefront of webtoons and scrolling comics. Originally hitting it big in the early 2010s through its flagship messaging app, KakaoTalk, South Korea’s most popular messaging platform, the company offers technological services in many areas. Think Korea’s version of Meta, YouTube, PayPal/Square, Uber, Steam, AI, Spotify, Universal Music, Paramount, Marvel Comics and Amazon, but all as one mega-group of interconnected companies.
According to Forbes, Kakao’s assets are worth around $19 billion, with annual revenue of nearly $6 billion, and a market cap of $13 billion. (By comparison, Warner Brothers Discovery’s market cap is about $18 billion, though its assets are worth $120 billion.) We’re looking at a huge multinational corporation here.
In Korea, Kakao is synonymous with KakaoTalk, an instant messaging app that has nearly 49 millions monthly active users, with the majority of Korea’s population using it. The app has successfully evolved into a universal platform for payments, banking, games and more. In the fintech arena, Kakao’s payment and banking platforms, Kakao Pay and Kakao Bank are also hugely successful.
Despite these huge businesses, Kakao Entertainment is one of the most important companies in Kakao’s global business expansion. A major player in the global digital landscape, Kakao Entertainment is responsible for some of the biggest IPs and webtoons/webcomics and web novels in terms of global reach today.
In addition to webcomics, Kakao’s Entertainment-related companies include their mobile games division Games, the webtoon/manga app Piccoma (which runs webtoons in Japan), the prose/web novel platform Radish, and the music company, SM Entertainment – one of the major forces behind the global rise of K-pop, representing such acts as Super Junior, Girls’ Generation, Shinee, EXO, NCT and aespa….among many others. How big? Kakao Entertainment’s K-Pop channel 1theK has 34M subscribers across more than 200 countries.
And of course, Tapas, the U.S. webtoon and web novel platform sponsoring KCB, is also a subsidiary of Kakao Entertainment. KakaoPage is one of Korea’s most successful content platforms, showcasing web novels, webtoons, and books.
In short, Kakao is a huge, massively diversified, multinational company that has been a major contributor to some of the biggest global entertainment trends of the last few decades.
The Rise of Kakao Entertainment and move into webcomics
Kakao Entertainment is the driving force behind the entertainment industry in the Kakao Group. Its goal is to “deliver storytelling to millions with a focus on Story, Music and Media” according to corporate PR.
Kakao Entertainment’s three core business areas are music (via the Melon music streaming platform, music IP planning/production through multi-labels, and K-pop distribution business); TV series and movie production (via their global partners); and more importantly for K-ComicsBeat, webcomics and web novels (via Tapas, KakaoPage, and Kakao Webtoon) which are where Kakao Entertainment has developed a way to spread IP called One-Source-Multi-Use (OSMU).
The OSMU approach takes adapted material to develop content directly from the original work as its creative center. Just think of AMC and The Walking Dead. Or better yet, Batman. Can a webcomic property be like Batman and go beyond comics and into TV, movies, games, and beyond?
The Kakao webtoon model is what the US comics market strives for: media development with comics as the wellspring, but on a continuous global level. In Korea, countless movies, and TV shows are based on webtoons: it’s considered the normal pipeline for entertainment and has the budgets to match. And now the properties are coming to the US, as with dramas like A Business Proposal, and of course the category leader, Solo Leveling, which has evolved from a web novel to a webcomic to a print comic to an anime.
These adaptations help both the original webtoon and the TV drama gain popularity and revenue, as one helps increase sales in the other. They also create brand loyalty. It’s a testament to the storytelling power of comics that the model is so successful.
Korean readership numbers equal or surpass any other comics numbers, and are top-of-the-line in hitting key demographics of 18-24 and 60% female. The webtoon format is also uniquely optimized for mobile devices – it’s a library in your pocket.
Enter Tapas
Tapas was founded in the US in 2012. Then known as Tapastic, it was a way ahead of its time portal for webcomics in the US – and also one of the first companies in N. America to popularize the vertical-scrolling webcomics format for mobile phones. After changing its name to Tapas, the company was acquired by Kakao in 2021 for $510 million – one of the signs that the webtoon revolution was coming to the US in a bigger way than ever before.
But this wasn’t Kakao’s first move in vertical scrolling comics. Kakao Corp. was formed out of a 2014 merger with fellow tech giant Daum Communications, which pioneered the vertical scrolling comic format itself. Their Daum Webtoon platform launched in 2003, and published Hello Schoolgirl, considered the first webtoon success (and later developed into a TV series.)
In some ways webcomics are baked into Kakao’s DNA as a company, even more than DC is into Time Warner Discovery, or Marvel in Disney. Between Tapas, KakaoPage and Piccoma, Kakao continues to grow its influence in the global webcomics and digital literature markets.
– Christian Angeles, Deb Aoki and Heidi MacDonald contributed to this report.
Sponsored by Tapas Entertainment
