Korea’s webtoon industry, built on a foundation of web novels adapted into serialized visual form, has officially crossed into the 2 trillion won revenue tier, but the growth curve that got it there is flattening out fast. According to a “2025 Webtoon Industry Survey” released late last year by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency, the domestic industry generated roughly 2.2856 trillion won in 2024, up just 4.4 percent from 2023’s 2.189 trillion won, a sharp deceleration from years when the market was nearly doubling annually.
The scale of that earlier growth was extraordinary: from 379.9 billion won in 2017, the market passed 1 trillion won by 2020, 1.5 trillion won in 2021, and 2 trillion won in 2023, more than a fivefold increase in six to seven years, as Korea’s mobile-optimized, vertical-scroll storytelling format found an eager global audience. Now that expansion has clearly matured. Domestic user numbers tell the story bluntly: Naver Webtoon’s monthly active users grew a modest 6.7 percent to around 12.97 million, while its web novel platform Series saw essentially flat usage at 3.94 million, and rival Kakao Page’s user base actually shrank nearly 7 percent to 5.79 million.
Overseas markets are where the real growth now lives. By export region, Japan accounts for roughly half of all overseas webtoon revenue at 49.5 percent, followed by North America at 21.0 percent, greater China at 13.0 percent, Southeast Asia at 9.5 percent, and Europe at 6.2 percent, with Japan and North America both gaining share year over year. Japanese readers in particular are known to spend considerably more per capita than domestic Korean readers, making the Japanese market an outsized pillar of the industry’s export revenue.
Financially, the two dominant players are telling different stories. Naver Webtoon’s US-based parent, Webtoon Entertainment, posted 2025 revenue of roughly 1.9647 trillion won, up just 2.5 percent, though its operating loss narrowed by about 37 percent to 90.2 billion won, with a return to profitability projected around 2027. Kakao Entertainment’s story division, which covers webtoons and web novels, fared worse, falling 11.5 percent to 440.1 billion won, the steepest decline among its three business lines.
The clearest bright spot remains original IP monetization. Web novel-turned-webtoon-turned-anime franchises like “Solo Leveling,” which has racked up a cumulative 14.3 billion views worldwide, illustrate how a single hit story can generate value across drama adaptations (38.3 percent of secondary IP revenue), character merchandise (18.4 percent), and anime (10.7 percent). A new tax credit for webtoon production costs, ranging from 10 percent for large firms to 15 percent for small studios, takes effect this year, aimed at easing pressure on the small production houses and emerging writers who make up much of the industry’s creative base as it enters this more mature, IP-driven phase.
Source: Jang Hoon, Issue Insight, June 25, 2026, citing Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Creative Content Agency data.
