How Webtoons Make Money: WEBTOON Entertainment by the Numbers

WEBTOON Entertainment runs webtoon and web-novel apps in several markets: Naver Webtoon (네이버웹툰) and NAVER SERIES in Korea, LINE MANGA and eBookJapan in Japan, and WEBTOON and Wattpad for the rest of the world. Its parent is NAVER (네이버), which the filings describe as a global information and communications technology company.¹⁹

Stories come out in short weekly episodes, and most of them are free to read. The newest episodes of an ongoing series sit behind a paywall. Readers who don't want to wait buy a "Fast Pass" to read them early, paying with Coins, the apps' own currency. Episodes of finished series can be unlocked with a "Daily Pass"; readers get some free each day and can buy more. At the time of its 2024 listing, the company said a Fast Pass typically cost 15 to 70 cents an episode, depending on the market, and a Daily Pass 30 to 40 cents.⁴

This "Paid Content" is the core of the business: $1,087.5 million of the company's $1,382.7 million revenue in 2025, or about 79%. That figure also includes $11.2 million of physical book sales through the platform.¹

In 2025 an average of 157 million users visited each month, and 7.5 million of them paid, a paying ratio of 4.8%. The share is far higher at home: 14.8% of users paid in Korea and 9.7% in Japan, against 1.5% in the rest of the world. The company says that figure is lower partly because it includes Wattpad, whose model relies mainly on advertising.¹

Japanese readers spend the most. Paid Content ARPPU in 2025 was $23.2 a month in Japan, $7.8 in Korea and $6.6 elsewhere, and Japan was the company's largest market by revenue, at $681.8 million against Korea's $522.0 million.¹

The company sells five kinds of advertising: display banners at the end of episodes and on the home screen; "achievement" ads that give readers Coins for completing a task such as signing up to a newsletter; pre-roll video ads; branded writing contests; and branded content made with creators. A reader can watch a 30-second, non-skippable pre-roll ad to unlock some paid episodes without paying.¹

Advertising brought in $164.3 million in 2025, down 1.1% on 2024, with falls in Korea and the rest of the world mostly offset by double-digit growth in Japan. In the second quarter of 2026 it was up 4.2% on a year earlier, at $47.1 million.¹³

The company counted 27 million creators at the end of 2025, the vast majority of them amateurs. That total includes about 400,000 web-comic creators and some 27.0 million web-novel creators.¹

Amateurs publish under standard terms and can earn from advertising once they pass viewership and subscriber thresholds. "Professional" creators sign formal agreements that give them a share of Paid Content revenue. The filings say these creators generally receive upfront fees and revenue shares, and some creators or publishers are paid minimum guarantees in advance; in return the company generally gets a period of exclusivity.¹

The creators' share is booked in cost of revenue, together with app-store fees paid to companies such as Apple and Google and other variable costs. In 2025 cost of revenue was $1,060.5 million, about 77% of total revenue.¹ In its 2024 prospectus the company said its creators had earned more than $2.8 billion between 2017 and 2023; in 2023, professional creators earned $48,000 on average and the top 100 an average of $1 million each.⁴

"IP Adaptations" is the company's term for turning its stories into films, streaming series, animation, games, print books and merchandise. It earns either fixed licensing fees or a share in a production's upside. Most adaptations are made with outside production companies, which bear most of the production cost. This stream grew 31.8% in 2025, to $131.0 million.¹ By the time of its 2024 listing, more than 100 series, films and animated series had been released based on its stories over the previous decade.⁴

Sweet Home, written by Kim Carnby and drawn by Hwang Young-chan, ran on Naver Webtoon from October 2017 to July 2020, and Studio Dragon and Studio N adapted it as a Netflix series.⁷ The company says that in the two months after the show's December 2020 release, its average monthly new users rose 30% compared with the two months before.⁴

Joo Dong-geun's webtoon ran on Naver Webtoon from May 2009 to November 2011, across 130 chapters.⁶ JTBC Studios and Film Monster turned it into a Netflix series, released on January 28, 2022.⁵ The company's IPO prospectus lists it among the series based on its Korean stories that reached number one on Netflix, alongside Hellbound, Bloodhounds and Mask Girl.⁴

The company's 2025 annual report names this Netflix series as one of that year's IP Adaptations.¹ It is based on the web novel Trauma Center: Golden Hour by Hansanleega and Hongbichira, which was also serialized as a Naver webtoon in 2019. The eight-episode series was released on January 24, 2025, and in the week of January 27 to February 2 it was number one on Netflix's global non-English TV chart, with 11.9 million views.⁸

WEBTOON Entertainment reported an operating loss in every period in the table above, and a net loss of $373.4 million in 2025, which included $336.5 million of impairment charges on goodwill and other intangible assets, the largest being a $257.2 million goodwill write-down on Wattpad.¹

Its annual report lists the risks it sees itself. Among them: only a small share of users pay, so the business depends on keeping and growing paying users; its push to earn more from IP Adaptations "may not be successful"; it depends on mobile platforms it doesn't control, chiefly Apple's and Google's, which also collect payment for Coin purchases; and NAVER controls a significant share of its voting power. The same report says government bans on Wattpad in certain countries contributed to the fall in users outside Korea and Japan in 2025.¹