Webtoon Leisure Will Go Public

Webtoon Leisure, the mum or dad firm of, amongst different companies, the Webtoon creator platform and Wattpad, has filed a prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Trade Fee as step one within the strategy of changing into a publicly traded firm. In keeping with the submitting, Webtoon plans to record its inventory on the Nasdaq market below the WBTN image.

The variety of shares to be issued, and at what worth, are nonetheless to be decided, however the prospectus supplies particulars on the scale of the Webtoon operation, and the numbers are spectacular. In 2023, whole firm income was $1.28 billion, up 18.8% over 2022, and its web loss rose to $144.7 million, from $132.5 million. Webtoon generates the majority of its gross sales by way of its paid content material enterprise, the place gross sales elevated almost 21% final yr, to $1.03 billion. The corporate’s newer operations, promoting and IP diversifications, had gross sales of $145.4 million and $108.3 million, respectively, in 2023. IP adaptions noticed the quickest income progress charge amongst Webtoon’s three companies, with gross sales up 31.4% final yr. The variety of month-to-month lively customers on the Webtoon web site continues to develop, and stood at 170 million in first quarter of 2024.

Webtoon’s paid content material platform options webcomics and webnovels from each newbie creators, which make up the overwhelming majority of the 24 million creators on the platform, and professionals, who use the service to construct their companies. In keeping with the submitting, in 2023, the common earnings per skilled creator have been at $48,000, with the highest 100 creators incomes a median of $1 million. Between 2017 and 2023, Webtoon paid out greater than $2.8 billion to its creators. And as of December 31, 2023, creators had generated greater than 54 million webnovel tales on the platform. Excluding Wattpad titles, Webtoon hosts about 750,000 mixed webcomic and webnovel titles.

Underneath the paid content material mannequin, tales are serialized in a fashion roughly replicating chapters in a e-book. Whereas nearly all of the content material on Webtoon is free, episodes which might be behind a paywall are solely accessible by way of the acquisition of a “Quick Go” subscription, which usually prices 15 to 70 cents per episode, whereas a “Day by day Go” prices 30 to 40 cents per episode.

Whereas paid content material accounted for 80% of Webtoon’s whole income final yr, the prospectus highlighted the expansion of its fast-growing IP adaptation enterprise. Webcomics revealed on Webtoon have been tailored into a lot of different media codecs, together with movie, streaming collection, video games, merchandise, and print books. Over the previous decade, the prospectus revealed, greater than 900 titles have been tailored into different codecs, together with over 100 streaming collection and movies, greater than 200 books, and over 70 video games. In 2022, Webtoon launched Webtoon Unscrolled, a U.S.-based imprint designed to convey lots of the web site’s hottest English-language collection into print for the North American market. Among the many publishers Webtoon has labored with are Amazon Publishing, HarperCollins, Macmillan/Tor Books, Penguin Random Home, and Simon & Schuster.

Webtoon was based in Korea in 2004 by Junkoo Kim and launched within the U.S. in 2014. The platform has customers in additional than 150 nations, with greater than half of its customers coming from exterior its core markets of Japan, Korea, and North America. (Japan and North America every have about 20 million customers.) Its largest proportion of customers are Millennials and Gen Zers, characterised by the corporate as 34 years outdated and youthful.