Sponsored by Tapas Entertainment
If you love comics, novels, TV shows and movies, you’ve probably noticed over the past five years the growth of webtoons, K-pop, K-dramas, K-movies, and web novels. Whether you’re reading them on your phones, watching K-drama or anime adaptations of webcomics on Netflix, Crunchyroll and Rakuten VIKI, or finding K-comics as printed editions from Ize Press, Seven Seas Entertainment, Inklore and many more, one reason why you’re seeing this is Jayden Kang.
Jayden Kang is a Vice President at Kakao Entertainment Group, leading the Global Story Business for this S. Korean tech and entertainment corporation. Kakao, the parent company of Kakao Entertainment, is a huge tech company that has a broad range of business ventures, including webtoons and webnovels via their global platforms Kakaopage (S. Korea), Piccoma (Japan) and Tapas (N. America). Kang sat down with K-ComicsBeat for a rare interview to tell us more about how Kakao Entertainment and Tapas’s vertical scrolling comics are affecting content worldwide.
Deb Aoki: What does Kakao Entertainment do, and how do the different parts of your “Global Story Business” work together?
Jayden Kang: I’m currently working at Kakao Entertainment as the VP of Global Story Business. Kakao Entertainment has three divisions: Story, Music, Media, with the Story division covering webtoon and web novel businesses. Before this, I worked at LINE, where I was involved with LINE TV and LINE Today, their video, news, and entertainment portal.
While I was there, I realized that mobile content platforms operate in a completely different way compared to traditional businesses. To succeed globally, it’s not just about creating great content, but also making sure it brings in revenue.
I also realized that running a mobile content platform business is tough, especially when competing with giants like Tencent, Google, Microsoft, and even OpenAI—all of them have massive resources. That’s why it makes more sense to focus on a specific segment and aim to be the best in that niche. In the K-content industry, Kakao can really lead by excelling in well-chosen areas.
Kakao Entertainment is changing the game with its expertise in music, media, and storytelling. The Story division is key to Kakao’s global growth, backed by a diverse customer base across all of Kakao’s businesses. This influence isn’t limited to South Korea; for example, Kakao Piccoma is the top manga app in Japan.
Aoki: Wasn’t it Solo Leveling that totally changed the game, as far as K-comics popularity in Japan? Do you have any idea why? What made that particular series the breakthrough for webtoons in Japan?
Kang: Solo Leveling is a symbolic title in the webtoon industry.
By ‘webtoons,’ I mean vertical-scrolling, mobile-first comics. Webtoons primarily target teenagers and young adults, the mobile-first generation. Unlike print readers, webtoon readers are typically younger and very comfortable consuming content on their smartphones.
The format is also different. The way webtoons are read and monetized influences their storytelling structure. For example, Solo Leveling has a straightforward storyline, so you don’t need to remember all the details each time you read a new chapter.
Compared to some Japanese manga, which build a complex worldview from the start and take time to fully unfold, Solo Leveling’s story is much simpler. Within just one or two episodes, you can easily understand what’s happening without needing to remember every single detail from previous chapters.
In webtoons, you often have straightforward characters who are either good or evil throughout the story. In novels, characters can sometimes shift from ‘good’ to ‘evil’ as the story progresses. In webtoons, though, that doesn’t work as well since readers might not remember what happened last week, let alone five weeks ago. So webtoon characters need to be straightforward. They can grow and change, but not in a way that confuses readers. That’s a key trait of webtoons.
Aoki: Vertical scrolling webtoons are created for mobile viewing first, which makes for a format that’s very easy and exciting to read on a phone and do it almost anywhere, any time. But North American fans love, and prefer to buy books in print, and almost every manga publisher I’ve talked to in the US says that digital sales are very, very small compared to print sales here.
Kang: I want to point out another key difference with webtoons: how authors and creators interact with readers.
On Tapas, for example, we usually launch a new series by offering the first 20 chapters. Readers can leave comments on individual chapters, or they might go to our Tapas community on Discord to share their thoughts. They might ask each other, ‘What’s happening in this chapter?’ or say things like ‘I love this character’ or ‘I don’t like these kinds of things.’ Our creators usually keep an eye on reader feedback, and some of these comments get reflected in upcoming chapters.
In a print publishing environment, this kind of instant feedback loop isn’t available to creators. Of course, there are pros and cons to this. But many creators in South Korea are highly sensitive to reader feedback. It’s a highly interactive way to create stories.
These stories are created in digital format, and some are later published as print books that fans buy in bookstores. They do this because they want the book version on their shelf too. So essentially, the mobile webcomics business in South Korea is fandom-driven.
Solo Leveling started as a web novel, then became a webtoon, was later published as print books, and is now an animated series and the basis for online games. This is all a product of this fandom-building ecosystem.
Aoki: Generally speaking, when a N. American comic book gets made into a movie, it gets turned into something very different from the story and characters in the original comics. The seamless synergy that the S. Korean entertainment industry seems to have is still mind-blowing for Americans. It all happens so fast too.
Kang: Currently, around 20 to 25% of K-dramas originate from webtoons, highlighting the strong connection between the webtoon and K-drama production ecosystems. These connections help create synergy across our three businesses: Music, Media, and Story. Such IP adaptation is crucial for extending the IP life cycle.
Aoki: Generally speaking, how much money does a successful web novel creator make?
Kang: Of course, it depends on the writer. One key milestone we look at is what they make within 3 to 6 months. If their total gross sales revenue hits around $100,000 during that time, we consider it a huge success. This actually happens pretty often in our company. So when we talk to web novel creators, we look for them to achieve these milestones as a measure of success.
Aoki: Just roughly speaking, what percentage of this gross revenue goes back to the writer? Does the majority of it go to the author?
Kang: Each contract is different, so it’s difficult to determine exactly what every author will earn from publishing on our platform. However, we strive to ensure that authors receive as much profit as possible.
On a slightly different side note, let me briefly explain the history of webtoons in Korea. In 2003, the webtoon service on the Daum Webtoon platform launched, which is why we say we pioneered the Korean webtoon market. A year later, in 2004, Naver WEBTOON also launched, marking the start of competition in this new industry.
In the beginning, webtoons didn’t generate much revenue. Webtoons were available to read for free, and creators may have made money from revenue sharing from advertising or book sales. Back in the early 2000s, nobody thought webtoons could make money, let alone significant profits. So these early webtoon sites said ‘Why don’t you bring your content to our platform? We have a lot of traffic, and we’ll share the advertising revenue with comic creators.’
Then, in 2014, Kakaopage entered the market as the industry’s first with the ‘Wait-or-Pay’ system. Readers could read chapters for free, but to access the next one, they had to wait a few hours, days, or weeks. If they didn’t want to wait, they could pay to read the next chapter right away. ‘Wait-or-Pay’ revolutionized the market, making webtoons profitable and allowing creators to earn money.
Currently, when teenagers in South Korea are asked, ‘What’s your dream job?’ one of the top five answers is webtoon creator. YouTube creator is the number one choice [laughs], but a successful webtoon creator can earn as much as a YouTube content creator.
IP adaptations of webtoons are quite popular now, and they’ve grown significantly over the last five years. Back then, many people doubted whether webtoons could be adapted into dramas or movies. It didn’t happen at the time because webtoons were seen as a subculture by the media.
But COVID-19 changed everything, making webtoons more mainstream in South Korea. Webtoons have become extremely popular in the Korean market, and now everyone knows about them. It’s still in the early stages in other markets, like the U.S., but it’s evolving and growing there too.
Sponsored by Tapas Entertainment
