In the 1980s and 1990s, the animation industry in Japan and South Korea ushered in a golden age. In Japan, national-level works such as “Dragon Ball” and “Slam Dunk” were exported to the global market. In 2010, the sales volume of a single book exceeded 6.53 million. At that time, one out of every four Japanese children bought “Shounen Jump”.
However, in the short ten years at the beginning of the 21st century, the mobile Internet completely changed the face of the comics industry. The hegemony of Japanese animation was gradually overtaken by South Korea, and the newcomers called web comics completely broke the old pattern.
A legendary story should have a legendary opening, but the story of the web comic is not so dazzling.
It started from the turning point of history and the helplessness of the traditional comics industry, but this helplessness caused the offensive and defensive trends of Japan and South Korea to change.South Korea, the place where the paper comic industry is in decline, took the high-speed train of the mobile Internet and counterattacked all the way until it broke the dominance of Japan and the United States in comics. It not only successfully exported Japan in reverse, but also further radiated the world.。
Think deeply about its historical process, and you can have a glimpse of the development direction of my country’s cultural industry.
“Newborns” After the Storm
In 1997, the Asian financial turmoil swept across Southeast Asia, with Japan and South Korea bearing the brunt. In this crisis, the Korean traditional comic publishing industry was almost devastated.
The downward side of the coin is that the financial crisis has led to a sharp rise in unemployment, which has affected the traditional comic book publishing industry. According to data from the Korea Publishing and Culture Industry Promotion Agency, between 1997 and 1998, the sales of the comic publishing industry dropped from 73.9 billion won to 43.4 billion won, a drop of 41%. The number of employees in the comic publishing industry also dropped from 3,626 in 1996 to 2,216 in 1998, a decrease of 39%.
But on the other side of the coin, changes in the storm are happening quietly.
The economic recession has led to a decline in people’s purchasing power, and the traditional comic book publishing industry is unsustainable.At that time, the Internet was booming in South Korea, and web comics began to rise. This new form of comics spread through the Internet and attracted more and more readers.。
The webtoon industry with Web+Cartoon was “born” in South Korea (also known as webtoon or barman). It became the prelude to the structural change of the Korean comics industry, but what few people know is that the “newcomers” webtoon was originally developed by advertising marketing.
「Web comics were originally established as an advertising model to attract users to web platforms, search portals, such as Daum and Naver, because the information that search engine services can provide is almost fixed. ” Lee Hyun-suk, the content producer of the Naver Webtoon webtoon platform, summed it up when he recalled the early development of Korean webtoons.
Daum is the earliest portal website in South Korea. It was launched in May 1997, four months before Yahoo entered South Korea. As the earliest portal website in Korea, Naver appeared in 1999 after the financial turmoil. It was the first portal website in Korea to develop and use its own search engine.
These two giants can be regarded as Sina and Baidu of South Korea. Relying on their first-mover advantages, they quickly occupied the local Internet market in South Korea. In order to further attract user traffic, large-scale digital marketing is essential. The development of comics provided the impetus.
In 2003, Daum, the largest portal website in Korea, launched the Daum Webtoon webtoon platform, attracting users to use Daum with free content, followed by NAVER, which also launched the Naver Webtoon webtoon platform in 2005, further developing the content of webtoons Form, the two have undergone several changes in the platform name, and have different names in different regions.
In fact, the original Daum Webtoon just spread the content of traditional comics through the Internet, which is equivalent to allowing users to see traditional comics on the Internet for free. The pioneering work of Junkoo Kim, the founder and CEO of Naver Webtoon broke this tradition.
The slide-up display style of Korean “webtoon”
As an avid manga fan, he witnessed the collapse of Korean manga publishing in the late 1990s and early 2000s,Inspired by the way of scrolling through the web, he loves manga and created a vertically scrolling way of manga narration (later he also added background music, animation effects, etc.), which not only broke the horizontal zigzag browsing habit of traditional Japanese manga, but also greatly Greatly expanded the audience of comics。
This new content form had to be said to be a pioneering work at the time. Because whether it is the PC era or the subsequent mobile Internet era, the scrolling, top-down browsing order has brought people a more convenient, efficient, and habit-forming content experience.
Coupled with the fact that web comics focus on colorful comic content, the content is more concise and linear. These have profoundly affected the content creation methods of Korean comics, and promoted Korean comics to get out of the shackles of imitating neighboring Japan.
andThe content method of web comics, which was initially aimed at advertising and marketing, not only attracted the attention of Internet users through its free core, but also further developed its own unique business model.
Stealing the teacher game, “tiaoman” makes money
With the rapid development of PC Internet in South Korea, web comics are like a big network, reconnecting the comics industry, and continuously accelerating the metabolism of comics content. However, just providing free content to attract users is not enough to support its positive development. What really changed the Korean comics industry and made it popular today is the formation of the unique business model of “wait for free”.
“Korea’s game industry is very developed, and the system of ‘wait for free’ can also be seen as a manifestation of game thinking.” Li Xianshuo analyzed, “In Korea, there is a popular puzzle game called “AniPang”, which can be played for free up to 5 times a day. times, it will cost money if you try to play more times.
This system is applied to web comics to solve the business model problem. There have been various debates in the past, such as whether to make web comics an advertising model or rely on selling comic books. It wasn’t until the invention of this “wait for free” system that web comics began to be evaluated as a real business model in Korea.」
The game he mentioned is a mobile game launched by the Korean social platform Kakao following the rise of smartphones.
According to reports, “Anipang” is extremely popular in South Korea. When the game was first released in the first quarter of 2013, its monthly active users reached 12 million. Users, if they want to play for a long time, they need to pay or invite others to download the game, or they can only wait for the next day to continue playing.
The more interesting point is that in 2014, Daum Webtoon’s parent company merged with Kakao and changed its name to Kakao Webtoon, which “justified” followed this unique business model.
Similar to the stamina system in social games, various web comics have to wait a day to read the next episode for free, but if you try to read it immediately, you will be charged. In this way, the web comic industry quickly cultivates a large number of loyal readers, which is This principle quickly became the target of many platforms to emulate.
South Korea’s “Tiaoman” has adopted the “advanced on-demand” monetization method
The “waiting is free” model is similar to the payment method of “advance order screening” on domestic video platforms we see today, both of which capture people’s time-sensitive needs for content consumption. As Kakao Japan Branch President Kim Jae-ryong said: “When people develop the habit of reading comics on their mobile phones, they will pay to read some interesting content.”
South Korea achieved a smartphone penetration rate of 73% as early as 2013. With the expansion of the two major social networking platforms Line and Kakao, games, comics, web dramas and other content have also become the direction of people’s daily content consumption.
Especially in the field of casual games and comics, it perfectly meets the fragmented time needs of Koreans’ daily commuting.According to statistics, more than 70% of users read web comics more than 7 times a week, and most of them belong to fragmented time。
At the same time, the construction of 3G mobile network and Wi-Fi infrastructure in South Korea is more popular than other Asian countries, which has accelerated the rapid development of the comic industry represented by web comics. In 2000, with the opportunity of hosting the World Cup, South Korean operators began to put 3G mobile phone services into the market. From the perspective of time, Korean users are the first group in the world to use 3G services.
In addition, about half of South Korea’s population lives in Seoul and metropolises, and South Korea has deployed advanced LTE and Wi-Fi equipment in the subway system, providing a good enough network environment for mobile phone users’ daily commuting.
As a result, Daum webtoon, Naver webtoon (later renamed Webtoon), Lezhin Comics, KaKao page and other well-known webtoon platforms emerged in South Korea, among which the three largest companies are Kakao, Naver and Duam.
By 2014, with the merger of Daum Webtoon’s parent company Daum and Kakao, Daum Webtoon was renamed Kakao Webtoon, and this fierce competition gradually became a rivalry between the two giants of Kakao and Naver.
data-driven authoring
At the moment when everyone cannot do without their smartphones, web comics that ride the high-speed train of the mobile Internet era are beginning to target a wider range of user groups. Through the content distribution model of free downloading of web comic apps + free reading of interesting content + waiting and continuing reading for free, web comics have successfully expanded their user base in no time.
According to the survey, 75% of webtoon readers are young people aged 15-35, and female readers are close to 60%, and a large part of them have no habit of reading comics in the past.
And there is no image of a “deep house” as people think. They prefer to watch dramas, watch movies, and pay attention to news about celebrities and artists. This unique and diverse user market is completely different from the users faced by the traditional European, American and Japanese manga markets, which basically target loyal manga readers.
therefore,When the users of web comics have covered the general population who did not read comics in the past, the audience of the comics industry has naturally been expanded.
This strategy is very similar to the strategy of “expanding the game population” proposed by the former president of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata. He once led Nintendo to develop ordinary people who do not play games as new game players, thereby occupying the global market, rather than focusing only on Legacy player groups.
Therefore, the global rise of Korean web comics can be seen as a successful expression of South Korea’s strategy of “expanding the population of web comics”.When the cake is enlarged, incumbents get more markets and have the opportunity to promote market ecological structural changes, which are reflected in the data.
“Taking Japanese comics as an example, if a magazine gathers 50,000 people, what the magazine has to do is to face the values of these 50,000 people. But if web comics are not good, they may affect hundreds of millions of users. Around the world , people read webtoons in the same format.”
Lee Hyun-suk pointed out that the existence of data makes Korean comics more adaptable to the laws of the market. “Writers of web comics can directly see the reactions of readers instead of going through the editorial department. Cartoonists will receive comments from readers, and they can also use various data. See changes, so the content changes based on that data.”
Therefore, data has become the core of Korean webtoon platform operations. From editing, operation, sales to design, every link is inseparable from data, and these data come from the daily performance of a large number of users on the platform. “For example, on the Webtoon platform under Naver, most of the new works can determine life and death within 5-10 episodes, and you can know whether it can be finished after 15 episodes.”
As a result, the online comic industry has formed a detailed division of labor in content planning, production, distribution, consumption and other links. Taking content production as an example, it includes webcomic production companies, studios, agents/brokers, platform editing departments, etc., and subdivides it into screenwriters, editors, storyboarders, colorists, brokers, etc. Even market analysts. Many practitioners related to comic production ensure the stability of the quantity and quality of the output of works.
This basis has promoted the advent of high-quality works, and has become an important basis for live-action dramas and animation adaptations. For example, globally popular works such as “Walk with God”, “Unborn”, “Tower of God”, etc., are all promoted by this sophisticated production structure. In addition, more and more Korean TV dramas are targeting the global market when they set up projects, making creators more cautious and need to avoid risks. Therefore, web comics are particularly “safe”, as Jia Wei, a domestic web drama practitioner pointed out:
“As the production costs of film and television productions increase, Korean drama writers tend to lean towards safer and more universal stories, while web comics continue to embrace fresh and adventurous stories. Coupled with the fact that more and more young, creative authors are starting to dabble in With web comics, it’s no wonder why streaming platforms are starting to look for ideas and talent in the web comic space.”
In fact, this development trend has allowed Korean webtoons to gain more voice, and has a negative impact on their content creation.
In 2021, Disney Animation will cooperate with Naver’s Webtoon comic platform, announcing that a new story line will be added to the Disney animation universe, and this story line comes from web comics。
In the same year, American comics publisher DC Comics also cooperated with the Webtoon platform, and the two sides successively launched “Batman: The Wayne Family Adventures”, “Vixen: New York City”, “Red Hood: Fugitive” and “Zatana” , and gained a good reputation and market performance.
After years of development, the successful works that have been verified on web comics have been extended to novels, TV, movies and other fields through “transmedia narrative” to build an entire ecosystem. This strategy is nothing new in the industry today. But if you observe carefully, you will find that Korean manga dramas rarely fail, which shows from the side that the Korean content industry has gradually established a perfect chain in the market competition.
For a global streamer constantly on the lookout for new material to satisfy audiences, web comics offer a seemingly endless variety of stories beloved by legions of fans around the world. When some users enter the pit from Korean dramas or anime, they are also likely to transform into the “webtoon population” who read the original works, and build a flywheel with the webcomic industry as the core.
Today, Korean webtoons have gained a wider following and experienced significant financial growth, becoming a Hallyu force that has taken the world by storm. Take Webtoon under Naver as an example. According to statistics from Google Play, it ranks first among comics apps in 100 countries.
“Stealing Home” Japan, Harvesting the World
The success of Korean web comics has not only promoted the progress of its own Internet industry, but also had an irreversible impact on the global comics industry. But when we discuss the success of Korean web comics, what cannot be ignored is South Korea’s inclination and support in cultural industry policy.
As early as the 1970s, seeing the huge economic energy brought by the development of the animation industry in neighboring Japan, the South Korean government began to introduce incentive policies to prosper domestic animation and encourage enterprises to switch to production and export. By giving preferential treatment in taxes, efforts Enhance the ability of originality, create local brands, especially in foreign markets as the main field of expansion.
This strategic perspective of “going global based on the local market” has put the Korean webtoon industry on the fast track of healthy development. From the perspective of the South Korean government, due to the limited scale of the local market, it is necessary to explore the international market in order to promote the development of the cultural industry.
For this,The basic strategy of the South Korean government is to aim at the international market, take the East Asian region with China and Japan as the step to enter the world, vigorously develop and promote exports, use the domestic market to recover production costs, and make profits through overseas markets.
To this end, the South Korean government has established “frontier bases” in cultural export strategic areas. For example, in 2001, the Korea Cultural Industry Promotion Agency established offices in Beijing and Tokyo, and later selected additional locations in the Americas and Europe. Through these “frontier bases”, it strengthened market research and development, and carried out market promotion, organization and support some related activities.
At the same time, through co-production with other countries, the Korean webtoon industry has gradually solved the problem of insufficient funds, learned advanced technology, and entered the international market.
In 2002, the South Korean government spent 1.71 billion won to participate in 12 exhibitions and sales activities related to music, animation, comics, games, and digital cultural products held in China, Japan, the United States, France, Germany, Finland and other countries, and 6 exhibitions in Spain and other countries. The country held 7 cultural industry investment fairs to attract investment.
In addition, the government encourages local original works to go out by setting up awards. For example, the workplace drama “Misaeng”, which is popular all over the world, and its original manga author, Yoon Tae-ho, won the “Our Manga” award from the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. These have become the driving force for the continuous advancement of the Korean manga industry.
With the blessing of multiple internal and external factors, the pace of Korean online comic platforms going global has been significantly accelerated, and Japan, a major country of “stealing home” comics, has become the most successful story of Korean online platforms in recent years.
“In Japan, the manga industry is dominated by magazines, and the ideas are very different from Korean web comics. Take “Shounen Jump” magazine as an example, the most famous rule is “elimination at the bottom”. Every issue of “Shounen Jump” will have a survey Let readers rate and vote for each manga, if a certain manga ranks at the bottom for three consecutive issues, then it will be hard to escape the fate of being cut in half.”
Comics practitioner Xiaoqi told Geek Park that the long-standing tradition of Japanese comics no longer has advantages in the Internet age. Because compared with the web comics dominated by massive data, the content of Japanese comics voted in a small area appears to be niche, and the Japanese Internet industry has not been able to develop an ecology like the Korean web comics industry.
As Takashi Nakano, editor-in-chief of Line Manga, said, Japan’s domestic manga industry is moving towards “Galapagosization”, that is, in an isolated environment (Japanese market), it grows alone and loses interchangeability with outside regions. When products and services with higher external adaptability and viability are used, it is easy to fall into the danger of being eliminated.
According to the “Anime Industry Report 2022” released by the Japan Animation Association, the market size of the Japanese animation industry will reach 2.7 trillion yen (approximately RMB 143.2 billion) in 2021, making it the second largest pillar industry in Japan. With sales of print comics at nearly the same level as in the past few years, the driving force behind this expansion is electronic comics. In 2021, the sales of electronic comics will increase by 20% year-on-year to 411.4 billion yen, and electronic comics have already occupied 60% of the entire comics market.
Surprisingly, web comics in the Japanese market have already occupied 70% of the market share of the comic application market. Korean comics represented by Kakao (Piccoma) and Naver (Line Manga) have defeated Japanese companies including Shonen Jump and Shueisha. Comics giant.
In order to enter the overseas market, Kakao used its “money ability” to massively expand its “ammunition depot” through acquisitions and shareholdings, and the results were remarkable. From 2013 to 2020, Kakao invested in 13 comic creation companies in seven years.
Especially in Japan, Kakao invested 41.2 billion won in publishing giant Kadokawa Group in 2020, acquiring a 2.7% stake in the latter. Subsequently, Kakao increased its shareholding to 8.3% with multiple additional investments, becoming Kakao’s second largest shareholder.
Similarly, Naver has also strengthened its strength through investing in a large number of shares. From 2017 to 2020, Naver has invested in 8 domestic webtoon companies in South Korea. In 2021, it will acquire Wattpad, a North American web creation platform, for US$600 million. In 2022, It also acquired eBOOK Initiative Japan (EBIJ), Japan’s largest e-manga platform.
Korean Webtoon has started global harvesting
The continuous growth of investment and shareholding has formed the Matthew effect, making Kakao and Naver stronger in the field of web comics.
In 2016, with the launch of Kakao’s Piccoma webtoon platform in Japan, Japanese ACGN content giants such as Kakaokawa provided massive content support. As of December 21, 2022, there were more than 15,000 works from Kadokawa on the Piccoma platform, and 5,234 from Shueisha. , Department 8628 of Kodansha, Department 10043 of Shogakukan.
However, Piccoma has maintained a continuous growth momentum and has long held the top spot in the Japanese webtoon rankings, followed by Line Mange under Naver. According to research firm Data.ai, Piccoma’s transaction volume will reach about 70 billion yen ($586 million) in 2021, almost double the previous year.
On the other hand, Naver is focusing more on the European and American markets for “gold rush”. Webtoon founder and global CEO Junkoo Kim believes that in the next 3-5 years, the US market will replace Asia as the most important market for web comics.
Today, the number of active users of the Webtoon platform under Naver has increased from 46 million in 2017 to 180 million in 2021, a nearly three-fold increase in 5 years, and is available in South Korea, Japan, North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America. Webtoon service in 10 languages, currently there are more than 6 million creators, and the cumulative number of works is about 1 billion.
With the development of the web comics industry, South Korea has become the third largest animation power after the United States and Japan, and its content production has accounted for 30% of the world‘s total output.
According to data from Yonhap News Agency, the export value of South Korea’s cultural content industry in 2021 will increase by 4.4% year-on-year to 12.45 billion U.S. dollars, overwhelming home appliances and secondary batteries (8.67 billion U.S. dollars each), electric vehicles (6.99 billion U.S. dollars), and display panels (3.6 billion U.S. dollars). U.S. dollars) and other main products have become Korea’s representative export products, hitting a record high.
comics in the new era
It can be seen that technological dividends, policy support, a virtuous circle of industrial ecology, and continuous investment in the capital market have jointly promoted the prosperity of Korean web comics. Twenty years may seem a long journey, but it has promoted the successful export of a country’s cultural industry to the world and captured the content minds of hundreds of millions of users, which shows the huge influence of the content industry.
Looking back at China, although my country’s online comics industry has been continuously rising in recent years, especially the three giants dominated by Kuaikan Comics, Tencent Animation, and Bilibili Comics, they have a relatively large share, but they are relatively weak in terms of content going overseas and expanding boundaries There is a big gap in South Korea.
On the one hand, this is due to the relatively large domestic stock market in my country. According to the “White Paper on China’s Two-dimensional Content Industry” released by China Insights Consulting,In 2021, the number of pan-two-dimensional users in China will reach 460 million. It is expected that the scale of the two-dimensional content industry will exceed RMB 100 billion in the next five years, of which the animation industry will account for more than 44%。
On the other hand, it can also be seen that the related industries are still not mature enough. Quick Look CEO Chen Anni once mentioned: “The ecology of Japanese and Korean comic creators is very healthy. In the entire ecology from the top cartoonists to the middle and then to the bottom, comic authors at each level have a very high degree of professionalism. Policy support for comics. “All these have created a better business environment, and in her opinion, the gap between my country and Japan and South Korea in terms of manga quality is already very small, and what is most lacking in China is to provide creators with a good and stable content output environment.
However, each company has also begun to take action to promote the strategy of expanding the audience for comics. In recent years, Tencent has tried to create an animation ecology through animation and screen adaptations, while Kuaikan Comics has launched short videos “Manju” based on comic content, all of which are looking for a diversified development direction for online comics.
With the advent of a new round of AIGC technological revolution, the industry has begun to change again. In the cutting-edge field of technology, Naver has already begun to deploy. Its Webtoon platform has formed an internal AI team and developed several projects using deep learning technology.
On October 27, 2021, Webtoon announced the launch of the test service of Webtoon AI Painter, which can help creators color their sketches.
Unlike manual coloring, AI coloring can complete the coloring of the entire image with just a few touches, which can greatly improve the coloring time of webtoon creators, thereby improving creative efficiency. This technology has been developed for 3 years, and the main core lies in the deep learning model, which uses about 300,000 data to learn the characteristics and various coloring styles of each region in the image, such as people’s faces, bodies and backgrounds. Related work has also been published On WACV 2022.
In addition, the team also used AI technology to realize the function of transforming real characters into animation effects, so as to improve the reading experience of web comic readers.
Looking back at the rapid activity and global development of the Korean web comic industry over the past 20 years, and comparing the Japanese comic industry from prosperity to stagnation, we can see the content changes brought about by the deep integration of technology and business models, and we can also see the possible future direction of our country. How to bring Chinese culture to the world, the development of Korean web comics may not only be a revelation, but also a warning.