
South Korea's booming 'webtoons' - oska
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/05/business/tech/south-koreas-booming-webtoons-put-japans-print-manga-notice/
======
jpatokal
One factor not discussed in the article is the differing attitude towards
exports, piracy and copy protection. Historically, and even today, it's
extremely difficult to legally view lots of Japanese content outside Japan,
yet Japanese producers pursue copyright claims with rabid fervor. Japanese
publishers for books and music were also extremely resistant to move to
e-books, digital downloads or streaming.

For whatever reason, South Korean publishers were not as myopic, meaning their
content could be more easily accessed -- at first technically illegally, but
soon there was a groundswell of demand that led to large-scale legal
rebroadcasting (TV stations showing Korean dramas etc) and that then led to
today's juggernaut. Manga is just the latest example of Japan losing a market
that really should have been theirs for the taking.

~~~
reaperducer
I don't think it's fair to call it myopic. That implies that one method is
correct and the other is wrong. It's more of a cultural difference.

While South Korea has largely embraced the Western style of instant
gratification hyper consumerism, Japan is more nuanced. And IMO, that's a good
thing.

There is value in scarcity, and in context. It's OK if a publisher doesn't
want its work distributed around the world for everyone to see. It's that
publisher's property. Having to travel to Japan to see, read, or hear certain
things is a good thing. If every thing and every experience was available
everywhere, there would be no point in travel.

Having ramen in a hole-in-the-wall ramen shop beneath the train tracks in
Japan is a different experience than having ramen in Japantown Los Angeles.

When my wife goes to Japan, she brings an small empty suitcase to ship home
just for the books, magazines, and music she can't get here.

It's like artists who destroy their work after a show. Scarcity increases the
object's value to some. And it's the artist's choice to do so, not the
audience's.

I know this is an unpopular view, especially in tech circles, but you don't
have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region
around the world all the time.

~~~
Quarrelsome
> but you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in
> every region around the world all the time.

Oh you do. Artists and general creatives often tumble into the trap of
thinking they can control the spread of their work following public release.
You cannot control the zeitgeist of a generation. If your work is popular than
the moment you print it, its spread is out of your hands. IP, copyright and
legal action are lossy mechanisms that work against the prevailing system. I'm
not saying they don't have value (they very much do!) but when your product is
consumer-grade content that don't have infrastructure you own baked into its
operation you'll find your stuff being obtained illegally if you don't make it
available legally and quickly.

I've seen break-dancers expect to be able to have exclusive rights to movement
into perpetuity enforced by community-driven shaming tactics (doesn't work)
and I've read enough scanlations to know that the Japanese approach to print
manga is negligent of the ramifications of globalisation. When you publish,
its gone. You have to be more prepared at publish time in the modern era.

~~~
tauwauwau
Just going to leave it here. Seems relevant

Planet Money: Joke Theft
[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/06/710404524/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/06/710404524/episode-904-joke-
theft)

------
httpz
Webtoons have a very interesting business model. Unlike manga, webtoons are
usually free and ad supported. I don't even have to sign up to start reading
one in most cases. The interesting part is, webtoons are usually released once
a week and you can actually pay ~30cents to read the latest episode before
it's released next week for free. So if you can't wait another week after a
cliff hanger, you can pay to read the next episode and now you're stuck in a
vicious cycle of paying every episode to be one episode ahead.

~~~
techwolf
Most webcomic artists have been using this model for a while now; no one likes
ads and they don't pay much, but $1 a month on Patreon to see pages a week
early isn't too much to ask. There are often higher tiers for bonus content
(sketches, high-res pages, side comics, etc.) as well.

------
yongjik
> Most webtoons trending on domestic manga apps are not only translated but
> meticulously localized for a Japanese audience, with names, locations and
> various proper nouns all Japanized. Even the original illustrations can be
> altered to erase anything distinctly South Korean, such as the design of the
> police cars.

Man, how the table has turned. This was exactly how South Korea imported
Japanese manga and anime for decades. Up until mid-90s virtually all Japanese
manga was "Koreanized" in a similar way, even though by that time everybody
knew they were Japanese. In earlier days they wouldn't even tell us: there are
a generation or two of Korean boys who grew up thinking Atom, Mazinga and
Future Boy Conan were Korean animations.

The wounds of colonization (1910-1945) were still raw, and admitting you liked
Japanese culture was frowned upon for a very long time. (Which is ironic,
considering most of children's prime time TV shows were made in Japan.)

South Korea briefly had a renaissance of comics ("manhwa") in the 90s, but
then widespread piracy together with the advent of the internet killed off the
industry in the early 2000s. I remember a comic strip where the protagonist
(the artist himself) decides to kill himself after going broke, so he turns on
the gas valve and go to sleep. He wakes up the next day because the gas line
was shut off for non-payment.

I think a major reason why Korea embraced webtoon so easily is that the
traditional comics industry was essentially burned to ground. Webtoons were
initially a side dish, offered by web portals (which are still strong in
Korea) to lure viewers because servers were cheap and artists were also cheap
(where else would they go, anyway?). (It also explains why it's basically free
and ad-supported.) But then it started to make money, and then money started
to attract talents, and so on.

If someone told me, only five years ago, that Korean webtoons will threaten
Japanese manga industry, I would've laughed. "What are you talking about? It's
Japan!"

------
hkmurakami
At the end of the day great content wins though. The medium’s convenience
really only makes a difference in the “filler” level content we consume.

For the winners of the power law in manga we’ll go wherever the great content
happens to be. (That being said japan is so bad at modern global digital
licensing / distribution they really have been leaving tons of money on the
table for the last decade+)

~~~
daxterspeed
It's honestly quite depressing to imagine just how much money is left on the
table regarding manga. The demand for translations has lead to massive amounts
of illegal sharing of digital/digitalized copies and there's even somewhat of
a living to be made of unofficial translations (though I know many translate
out of self interest).

I'm hoping that there'll eventually be a Steam for manga. I know several
companies are trying to become that, but they've all failed to catch on with
both consumers and producers.

~~~
Retric
US pricing is silly. But, the US market for this stiff is also fairly tiny.
Outside of a small number of mega hits it’s just not worth the company’s time
to try and sell to the US market.

Some of this just comes down to cultural differences. Most US novels don’t get
translated to Japanese.

~~~
hakfoo
I think part of the weirdness of the market is that they, unconsciously, are
straddling the "content" and "souvenir/collectible" market. It's sort of like
vinyl records today in that regard.

I'm a moderate enthusiast-- probably have like 200 volumes of English
translations. I am not really interested in digital platforms, both because
then you get no physical souvenir, and because I don't trust them to not
implode suddenly. I suspect most long-term fans have a series or two they
loved but had to give up on because the translator went bust or it disappeared
from whatever service they subscribed to. Once bitten, twice shy...

------
duckonomy
Korean here who has been watching webtoons since the very beginning.

Unlike some recent hits made by printed manhwa artists, webtoons were
initially an amateur thing. Where as mangas always seemed to have a certain
level of professionality in terms of detail and storytelling.

That said, it is interesting how Koreans adapt to these technologies really
fast and globalize their culture through a media platform.

It feels really weird when you spot someone reading a webtoon in public in the
US because that was just native Koreans who lived in Korea 5 years ago.

~~~
sdrothrock
Since you've been reading webtoons for a long time, I have a question if you
have time.

A lot of the most popular webtoons I've read are based on serialized novels
(e.g. 귀환자의 마법은 특별해야 합니다) -- I've been wondering if this is an actual link, or
just some kind of selection bias. Do you know?

~~~
duckonomy
I'm not really sure what the "most popular" webtoons among non-Koreans. I know
some American friends who showed me some that were supposedly popular, but I
couldn't recognize.

That's certainly not a trend in mainstream webtoons, which are usually the
Naver Webtoons. Nearly all (can't think of any one based on something) of them
on that platform are original content. Sometimes they get published as novels.
Like Noblesse.

I think the particular one you mentioned is based on a webnovel (similar to
webtoons but novels).

I definitely see this trend in Japanese mangas though.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
Interesting to see the picture on the top of the article, meant to represent
Japanese print manga, features Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan) most
prominently.

I don't think I've read any True Beauty, but then again, the fact that I'm not
at all sure whether I have, whereas there is no chance of a snowball in hell
that I'd confuse Shingeki No Kyojin for anything else, suggests to me that
Japanese print manga still have a future. To say the least.

And can I take this opportunity to point people to Totsukuni no Shoujo (The
Girl from the Other Side)?

[https://myanimelist.net/manga/93972/Totsukuni_no_Shoujo](https://myanimelist.net/manga/93972/Totsukuni_no_Shoujo)

Once in a while, I find a little gem like that buried under all the shonen and
shoujo in my local bookstore. That's what keeps me coming back for more.

------
seibelj
Anecdotal, but my wife is obsessed with webtoons and eagerly awaits new
updates to the (50? 100?) different stories she’s following. It’s similar to
the way I consume podcasts. She especially likes romance webtoons.

Before finding webtoons she had no interest in graphic novels, comics, anime,
etc. and still doesn’t. She just likes her webtoons.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
It's all about content and demographic targeting. Female targeted comics
basically do not exist in the west. Shoujo manga is not popularized /
suppressed by the western community. Webtoons have a lot of female creators
early on represented that continuously pump out women targeted content. Women
could easily be 80% of the core video game playing population if the correct
content was made. It's an absolute joke that it's been more 10 years and we
still haven't gotten a single twilight video game.

~~~
Vomzor
I think you’re wrong on both counts. I know plenty of female targeted comics
in Belgium and France.

And half of gamers are women. Women just like to play different games than
men. Casual games that are dismissed as ‘real games’ by many. But even before
smartphones casual games were a billion dollar industry.

There’s a study [1] that spells out which game genres are dominated by women.
They surveyed 270,000 gamers about their favorite game titles. According to
this study, women make up about 70% of match 3 and family/farm simulation
games’ audiences. About half of casual puzzle and atmospheric exploration
games are played by women, too. The gender ratio plummets when we get to
first-person shooters, tactical shooters and racing games. At the bottom of
the chart, a mere 2% of sports game-players are women

[1] [https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-
genre...](https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/)

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
You cannot compare the female targeted comics to something like marvel
superheroes. I'd be shocked if it has even 1% of the popularity of male
comics.

And of course I'm talking about games that cost 50+ million dollars to
develop. I find your comment about different games to smack a bit
segregationist. The female market dominate many hardcore games including the
most popular game of 2016/2017 Arena of Valor:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/01/02/57...](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/01/02/574471694/chinas-
most-popular-mobile-game-charges-into-american-market) You'll also notice a
marked rise in gamers who play more recent games like Overwatch and Fortnite
because they pander to men just a little less. Anyway I'm talking about core
games and if you target correctly there should be as many girls playing those
as in mobile games too.

------
Animats
Japan and South Korea are in a battle over popular culture. Japan has the Cool
Japan Fund to invest in pop culture projects.[1] The fund, backed by the
Government of Japan and some big banks, was well-financed, but the projects
have not been very successful.[2]

They need some better VCs.

[1] [https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/](https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/) [2]
[https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering-
co...](https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering-cool-japan-
projects-see-loss-after-loss.html)

~~~
echelon
Who will win this battle? What are the ramifications?

~~~
intertextuality
There's no battle. Both Korea and Japan see the value in exporting cultural
products, although I don't think the Korean government is focusing on webtoons
as much as kpop.

Manga and webtoons are different and cater to different audiences.

In any case manga is much, much more popular and actually gets translations. I
think this is due to the longer publishing schedules and how established manga
is compared to webtoons.

------
ksec
Warning: May be inappropriate comments ahead.

I stumbled upon the topic many years ago when I was looking at online
publishing and making money. And Webtoons in South Korea caught my eyes, It
was in its early days but I first thought it was some idea that will be
destined to fail. Simply because I don't believe there is a market that are
willing to pay for it, the content were; Amateur at best. And it was too easy
to private. I was wrong. I knew I was wrong because it is gaining momentum not
only in Japan, but also across in SEA.

There are two distinct category that Web Toons, and specially South Korea
Webtoons excel in. LGBT and Adult Content.

In LGBT I have no idea the audience were _huge_ , with distribution channel
like the web, even a small percentage would be a massive Number. And it was
amazing to see lots of female secretly fantasise about Gay Man. And unlike man
where many are privating porn, they are very much willing to pay for it.

Then there is Hentai, ( the world actually means something else in Japanese
but its English form is mostly used to describe Porn in Cartoons or 2D ). I
mean, who enjoys it? And even if they did, who is wiling to paid for it? Again
turns out the audience is actually gigantic. Pornhub even confirmed this when
they release their data analysis.

One day I chatted with an old friends, he is a real life translator who used
to do subtitle for Anime as hobby and ask him what is he up to. Turns out he
was doing these Webtoons translation from Korean and was making good money.
Good not in terms of amount, but in terms of time spent vs money made. As it
was much easier to do compared to Animation.

~~~
cirno9
Commercial and independent gay and lesbian manga have existed for 40-50 years,
and there's also a significant number of gay/lesbian anime and games.

------
olingern
I live Japan and this is a great example of how the culture holds on to
tradition even if it hurts them over time. Manga is interesting because it’s
actually a quite old art form, but the current print method of publication is
not [1]. So, you’d expect the web to be a natural, obvious progression.

I’d liken the ethos here to: “Move slow and never break things.”

1 -
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga)

------
FrozenVoid
There are some programs that colorize manga(e.g. neural networks), if it was
more popular it would add a competitive advantage vs webtoons - artists can
tune automatic colorization themselves(vs drawing color). Reading monochrome
black drawings is very confined expirience, such colors are depressive,
dramatic and bleak - colors that evoke negative associations and melancholy.
Color expands the emotional gamut significantly.

------
philliphaydon
Japan still uses tape to go from agency to broadcaster (this has only started
to change over the last couple of years) and a lot of it is to do with not
wanting to put people out of work and less about adopting technology. The way
business works in japan is just so different to anywhere else in the world.

------
sercand
I have paid to webtoons for fast-pass several times but not for manga from
Japan. One of the reason is official translations come later than the fan
translated versions. After a couple of days, there is no remaining discussion
of the chapter at the community.

Also, the community is ready to pay for the new manga chapters. Last month, a
fan translation group removed their translation of a webtoon, which was in the
fast-pass period, because of backlash by the community.

I wish manga is more accessible. Because they are professionally crafted and
have better storytelling.

------
kevingadd
One other element to webtoons' success that isn't mentioned in this article:
When I see people talking about comics with LGBT themes that aren't from the
US, a significant % of them are Korean webtoons on one of the multiple portals
that have dozens of active series with those themes in them. This seems like a
savvy way to target audiences that are traditionally underserved (i.e. if they
want to find this content, japanese or otherwise, it's quite difficult). Some
of the portals seem to specialize in this content - Approximately 1/2 of
Lezhin's active series appear to be about homosexual romance, for example. For
a Japanese consumer a lot of this content is either in 1-3 focused
monthly/bimonthly print series or picked up at comics festivals in-person.

I've seen some attempts to target this audience from Chinese artists as well
but with the policy changes made by the Chinese government lately I have no
idea if those artists will be able to continue with their work - I've seen a
few reports from artists that the government is actively punishing them for
releasing that kind of content now (hopefully this is not true).

------
Noos
Eh, they'll die off. Tokypop used to try and license Korean manhwa here a
while back ago, among other publishers. If you remember the movie the Priest,
that was about as famous as it got here. I used to read it, usually it was the
same problem a lot of Korean stuff has..it's an okay copy, but there isn't
really an original spark to it that makes it come alive like manga does.

------
kmlx
it’s great that this forces more manga to move to the web. where’s my Netflix
for manga Japan?

anecdotally, on a JAL flight between Tokyo and London (for which Russia taxes
every passenger individually, story for another time), I saw a bunch of manga
on the in-flight entertainment system, and people were actually using it to
read. cooler still, seeing both the parents and their children reading
different manga.

~~~
intertextuality
If someone did a subscription service for manga with quality translations (and
coloring) they'd make a killing, probably.

~~~
kmlx
the problem is the medium: manga are just not made for digital consumption.
they’re brilliant for analog thou.

i’ve tried a couple of these services, but they were quite subpar.

~~~
laurus
I don't see how reading manga on an E-ink ereader, with one page filling the
screen and "turning" pages by pressing the right side, is fundamentally
different from reading it in "analog" (paper) form.

I wouldn't want to read it on a non E-ink screen, or have to scroll within a
single page though.

~~~
intertextuality
Parent probably was referring to reading it on a laptop or similar, which many
people do. (I also read it this way).

I use the SimpleComic reader on OSX, first removing the menu and then
fullscreening it. This requires me to download the manga beforehand. It works
for me since I don't read that much manga.

Now that I have an ipad I wonder how well it could work.

------
syntaxing
I'm a pretty huge reader of manga and I have been reading a couple of webtoons
lately. Besides South Korean ones, there are couple of Chinese Webtoons that
is based off of famous web novels that is really fun to read. South Korean
webtoons tend to have "weird" formatting since its one long page rather like a
book since its catered towards phones or tablets. I noticed a good amount of
webtoons out of South Korea that is sponsored by Line originally but the
industry has really taken off this past couple years with independent
publishers. Not sure if this is true since I only see the English translated
ones rather than the originals but I find that South Korean webtoons has a
higher percentage of being explicit material. Not sure if it's because
translators chose them on purpose since they have a higher click rate?

------
kochikame
Japanese people are reading ad-supported free manga on their phones and
tablets constantly nowadays.

There are several competing services and they seem to be spending a lot on
advertising right now if the amount of TV commercials is anything to go by

------
rb808
Can someone please link to a webtoon so I can figure out wtf they're talking
about?

I feel old.

~~~
intertextuality
I mean, "webtoons" aren't really a thing in western culture. You can think of
the posts like chapters from a comic. Anyway, here's the latest chapter[0] of
마음의 소리 ( _The Sound of Your Heart_ ) which is popular. Enough to have its own
tv show on netflix.

You can see more of them at comic.naver.com [1]

[0]:
[https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=...](https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=1173&weekday=tue)

[1]: [https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn](https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn)

~~~
philshem
I really enjoyed the first season of The Sound of Your Heart.

------
cjsawyer
“Internet threatens print industry” would’ve been a less interesting headline.

------
Quarrelsome
worth noting One Punch Man started out in a web toonish delivery mechanism
before being turned into manga.

------
novok
The ideas in Reinventing Comics are finally becoming mainstream.

------
leggomylibro
Web comics were pretty big in the West for a while, too - I guess they never
really got large enough to be commercialized and produced on an industrial
scale, though.

The article mentions that a lot of these webtoons are vertically-oriented for
smartphones; is that what sets them apart? Or is it more of a genre thing? Did
they maybe crank up the production values a bit?

[https://xkcd.com/157/](https://xkcd.com/157/)

~~~
intertextuality
It may be a little bit of A, a little bit of B.

Anecdotally I can tell you I've seen many, many people reading webtoons on
their phones on the subway. I've done it. The vertical format in this case is
perfect.

------
m3kw9
On notice like scoring a point when you are down 10-0

------
nyxxie
Another day another story of an old style of business facing obsolescence due
to shifting market conditions.

The narrative for stories like this one is usually “businesses stuck in their
ways refuse to adapt and die out”, painting the business as fools who die due
to their incompetence and conservative mindset. I’m curious, though; is there
any reason why Japan’s manga publishers might want to retain their focus on
print media rather than move to a digital focus?

Going digital seems like the clear optimal move here, they might even consider
encouraging artists to create their own webtoons and make Japan competitive in
that space. Why might they not want to do so?

~~~
jniedrauer
> an old style of business facing obsolescence

Manga is nowhere near obsolete. It's such a huge market that there are entire
supporting industries indirectly built around it.

> Why might they not want to do so?

Probably because they're raking in money.

~~~
nyxxie
> Manga is nowhere near obsolete

I agree. The obsolete label applies to _print_ manga, not the medium itself.

------
0x8BADF00D
They’re essentially the same thing. I see ads for webtoons but the tropes are
the same you see in manga. Very large breasted women who are all attracted to
the socially awkward nerdy guy.

~~~
yorwba
That is probably more indicative of the kind of content that pulls in eyeballs
when broadly advertised than the genre as a whole. For example
[https://www.heartofkeol.com/](https://www.heartofkeol.com/) probably counts
as a "webtoon" and follows a different set of tropes.

~~~
Nasrudith
Also a matter of targeting - with fresh accounts browsing certain subsets
where I didn't bother to install have clearly gotten work youtube for music
loops to think of me as a woman completely accidentally.

I got essentially entirely romance manga banner ads and video ads were for
birth control, menstrual products, and oddly schizophrenia medication (not
sure if that is broad targetted or not). It makes them look amusingly inept at
ad targeting and someone in marketing look kind of sexist - given that guy ads
tried to sell me cars and beer constantly.

