Kim Yong-su (김용수), the new president and CEO of Webtoon Entertainment, appeared at an official event for the first time since taking office on March 17 and announced expanded investment in the creative ecosystem.

At a press briefing at Naver Square Yeoksam on March 17, Kim said revenue distributed to creators worldwide from 2021 to 2025 over five years amounted to 4.15 trillion won. He said the company will continue its investment stance in the creative ecosystem this year and expand the scale of support.

Kim said creators' success is webtoons' success, defining the company's business structure as a "flywheel".

The flywheel is a virtuous cycle in which creators submit works, users flow in and users' paid purchases turn into creator revenue, which in turn grows the creator ecosystem. He said that after the introduction of AI recommendations, concentration in specific works eased and a structure formed in which diverse works meet their own readers. As a result, paid users are increasing in both the South Korean and global markets, and intellectual property found in webtoons is expanding into OTT series, films, animation, games and publishing, he said.

He added that IP expansion contributes to both creators' name recognition and increased revenue, and also serves as a route for users who did not know webtoons to seek out the original works. He said IP expansion routes from novels to webtoons and from webtoons to screen adaptations are appearing beyond South Korea in global markets as well.

UGC, video and digital characters to expand flywheel on three fronts

This year, Webtoon Entertainment plans to expand the flywheel across three areas: creators, content and users.

In the creator area, revamping the UGC platform CANVAS will be key. CANVAS is a submission platform for amateur creators, and global hit works such as "Lore Olympus," which ranked No. 1 in the United States for five consecutive years, were born through this channel. This year, a creator support budget of more than 70 billion won will be投入ed into contests, creator education and welfare, and support for global expansion.

In the content area, the company will simultaneously push to expand video formats and foster mega IP. South Korea's short-form service "Cuts" and North America's "video episodes" are in operation, and multiple long-form animation projects are under way in Japan. Video episodes combine voice-actor recording with auto-scroll and are currently applied to about 20 popular titles.

"Tower of God," presented as a mega IP case, has expanded into a Crunchyroll animation, a No. 1 App Store game and published books, rising to a position where it competes with top-tier global IP. Globally, "Lore Olympus" signed an animation deal with Amazon Prime, with season 1 scheduled to be released in late 2027, and Wattpad original "Chasing Red" is being produced as a live-action film after being adapted into a webtoon. Taiwan local work "Blackbox" also ranked No. 1 on Netflix for two weeks.

In the user area, the company recently expanded its AI-based character dialogue service CharacterChat to Japan, and plans to launch a comics platform co-developed with Disney at the end of this year. The company said it will integrate Naver Webtoon's AI recommendation technology into the platform, and that the two platforms' user bases are clearly distinct, enabling complementary growth.

Illegal distribution down 80 percent, payments up 200 percent with simultaneous releases

Webtoon Entertainment also released results of its response to illegal distribution. According to the company, tracking and blocking pirated copies through its proprietary technology Toonradar cut, as of November, the number of works copied to South Korean illegal sites on the day the latest episode was released by about 80 percent versus the average for the first to third quarters last year. After piloting "simultaneous releases" that eliminated the time gap between South Korean and global serialization, payments for the selected works rose by as much as more than 200 percent. It was the result of drawing overseas users who had headed to illegal sites into official services. Kim said both payments and overall readership rose meaningfully, and said the company will expand simultaneous releases.

In a question-and-answer session, questions continued on principles for using AI, the creator revenue structure, global competitiveness and the direction of future investment. Asked about the direction for AI use, Kim said that AI cannot replace creation. The policy is that AI involvement in the act of creation itself will be made only within the scope accepted by creators. On the current situation in which paid content accounts for more than 80 percent of total sales, he said that in the mid to long term, the share of advertising and IP businesses must grow faster than it does now.

Asked about competitive threats from global big tech companies' expansion into content, Kim said the differentiation from simple distribution platforms is a structure that directly possesses a creator ecosystem and produces exclusive content. On the direction of future investment, he stressed that whether through M&A or equity investment, the company will proceed in ways that are meaningful for flywheel growth.