The webtoon was invented by necessity. In the early 2000s, Korean cartoonists began publishing comics on web portals in a format optimised for scrolling on desktop monitors — vertical strips rather than the horizontal pages of print manga or American comics. When smartphones arrived, the format required almost no adaptation: vertical scrolling is how humans use phones, and webtoons were already vertical. The accident of timing produced a structural advantage that two decades of global competition have not eroded.
South Korea's webtoon industry generated KRW 4.1 trillion in revenue in 2025, a figure that includes platform subscriptions, individual episode purchases, character licensing, and the increasingly significant adaptation rights market. The last category has become the industry's fastest-growing revenue stream: 340 webtoon properties were adapted into film or television productions globally in 2024, including six that became international streaming hits with audiences exceeding 50 million viewers.
The platform architecture that supports this industry — Naver Webtoon and Kakao Webtoon are the dominant players, each with operations in 40 or more countries — is built around a creator economy model that has produced a professional class of webtoon artists unknown in most national comics traditions. Top creators earn the equivalent of KRW 2 to 5 billion annually from combined platform revenue and adaptation deals.
For South Korea's cultural diplomacy strategy, the webtoon sector represents something more significant than a profitable export: it is a vector for Korean language, aesthetics, and narrative sensibility that reaches audiences in markets — Southeast Asia, Latin America, North Africa — that Korean television drama has not fully penetrated.
"K-drama opened the door," said Naver Webtoon CEO Kim Jun-koo. "Webtoon is what people find when they walk through it."