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.
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.
At the risk of sounding somewhat like I'm stereotyping, why is this? I never associated this with Japan in particular, but between losing out of loads of Japanese music I followed a few years ago and Nintendo basically invalidating everyone's Wii purchases it feels like it is ingrained in the corporate culture over there particularly for the large publishers.
Not that we have our own blemishes, DMCA, disregard for things like fair-use, parody and so on, etc. Heh, now that I think of it we have our own issues too.
Manga publishers and Japanese music publishers (uh... essentially Sony) are actually very different. To be fair, quite a long time ago manga publishers were actually incredibly lenient/naive about managing their copyright. I'm not sure I should admit this publicly, but I used to do translation for a scanlation group (we only did things that were out of print even in Japan... taking the moral, if not legal high road ;-) ). Publishers at that time generally left you alone and didn't really care about scanlators because they thought that there wasn't a market in the west.
This probably sounds unbelievable, but I actually talked my group into seeing if we could license the manga we were scanlating. I figured that since it was all obscure stuff (even in Japan) it wouldn't cost that much. So we contacted them and they were very interested. They sent us over a price sheet for various manga and I couldn't believe the cost. They were charging about $1000 per volume with no royalties! And that was for current stuff (at the time -- round about 2000).
You may have heard of Viz (publisher of translated manga). I can't remember exactly, but I believe even Inu Yasha was priced around that point (and I couldn't believe that Viz didn't have an exclusive deal). But basically, all at once I realised that Viz was built by essentially getting all the manga for free and publishing it!
Around about 2005, the manga publishers started to realise that they were being insane. Especially for manga that made it to anime, they began to aggressively get exclusive deals for the translation rights. Then they started to send out notices to groups (mostly fansubs, but I heard some scanlation groups got letters) to ask them to stop.
As for our group, we couldn't convince them to go to a digital platform. They were still really wary about it and didn't understand the technology. We didn't want to go to print because... Ummm... we had no money and were only doing it for fun. So we let it slide. They never contacted us again although they clearly new we were violating their copyright. They just didn't care, I think.
In my mind, anyway, that's how the manga/anime scene was built in the west originally anyway. It was powered by scanlation groups and fansubs. It was already super popular by the time the publishers realised that they had a market in the west -- and then they cashed in.
It's hard to say what Japanese publishers should do. I agree that they should have moved to digital a lot earlier. However, even saying that, we scanlated a web manga from an author we liked. It was incredibly unknown in Japan even though the author had a successful anime. Nobody in Japan was interested in a free web comic at the time. Bizarre, but true.
As for South Korea, I think they realise that they have to do things differently in order to break into the market. However, I'll predict that the situation will repeat itself. As soon as they have the kind of market share they want, they will start to close the doors. It's just the way these business guys think.
Nowadays, the manga publisher Shuiesha (known for the Weekly Shōnen Jump) has an official website where can view the last few chapters of each of their manga, translated into English.
Manga is very widespread in the West, so much so that it seems to even eclipse Western comics. It has a big piracy scene that the industry doesn't seem to be doing much to resist. Anime has been exported for as long as it's been around, a major anime boom started in the US in the late 90s, and now you can legally stream practically every anime series at the same time as it's airing in Japan (or after it's finished if it's on Netflix). Anime streaming grew out of pirate streaming until Crunchyroll went legit, and even before that there were tons of series released on DVD and fansubbed on the internet. Practically nothing is or has been done about piracy. Foreign revenue for the anime industry has been growing by leaps and bounds and has never been higher. (https://aja.gr.jp/english/japan-anime-data)
So it's not true that Japanese media is poorly distributed outside Japan, that copyright enforcement is too strict, and that Korea has been eating Japan's lunch. Very few people even know about webtoons compared to manga; r/webtoons has 2K subscribers, r/manhwa has 5.5K, while r/manga and r/anime both have a million. Korea's animation industry is practically non-existent compared to Japan's, and their game industry isn't much better. Kpop is more internationally successful than Jpop, but that's also because Jpop just doesn't appeal to Westerners. I believe Kdramas were at some point more successful and widespread in the West, but I'm not sure what the situation is today. There are now many Jdramas on Crunchyroll and Netflix.
I'd take anything the Western media says about Japan with a big pile of salt, because they've long been pushing various doom-and-gloom narratives about a struggling Japan. Chinese animation was supposed to have upstaged the anime industry by now, according to the media.
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.
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.
> 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!"
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+)
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.
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.
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?
I'd compare the Korean webtoon scene more to the american webcomic scene than to the professional manga environment. Maybe it also compares well to doujin, though to me it feels like the closest resemblance is webcomics.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
If you like really, really dark SF, I would recommend Denma, but for some inexplicable reason they seem to have rearranged the panels in some dummy's-mobile-friendly format. What a sacrilege.
[+] [-] jpatokal|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noobermin|7 years ago|reply
Not that we have our own blemishes, DMCA, disregard for things like fair-use, parody and so on, etc. Heh, now that I think of it we have our own issues too.
[+] [-] mikekchar|7 years ago|reply
This probably sounds unbelievable, but I actually talked my group into seeing if we could license the manga we were scanlating. I figured that since it was all obscure stuff (even in Japan) it wouldn't cost that much. So we contacted them and they were very interested. They sent us over a price sheet for various manga and I couldn't believe the cost. They were charging about $1000 per volume with no royalties! And that was for current stuff (at the time -- round about 2000).
You may have heard of Viz (publisher of translated manga). I can't remember exactly, but I believe even Inu Yasha was priced around that point (and I couldn't believe that Viz didn't have an exclusive deal). But basically, all at once I realised that Viz was built by essentially getting all the manga for free and publishing it!
Around about 2005, the manga publishers started to realise that they were being insane. Especially for manga that made it to anime, they began to aggressively get exclusive deals for the translation rights. Then they started to send out notices to groups (mostly fansubs, but I heard some scanlation groups got letters) to ask them to stop.
As for our group, we couldn't convince them to go to a digital platform. They were still really wary about it and didn't understand the technology. We didn't want to go to print because... Ummm... we had no money and were only doing it for fun. So we let it slide. They never contacted us again although they clearly new we were violating their copyright. They just didn't care, I think.
In my mind, anyway, that's how the manga/anime scene was built in the west originally anyway. It was powered by scanlation groups and fansubs. It was already super popular by the time the publishers realised that they had a market in the west -- and then they cashed in.
It's hard to say what Japanese publishers should do. I agree that they should have moved to digital a lot earlier. However, even saying that, we scanlated a web manga from an author we liked. It was incredibly unknown in Japan even though the author had a successful anime. Nobody in Japan was interested in a free web comic at the time. Bizarre, but true.
As for South Korea, I think they realise that they have to do things differently in order to break into the market. However, I'll predict that the situation will repeat itself. As soon as they have the kind of market share they want, they will start to close the doors. It's just the way these business guys think.
[+] [-] FreeFull|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cirno9|7 years ago|reply
So it's not true that Japanese media is poorly distributed outside Japan, that copyright enforcement is too strict, and that Korea has been eating Japan's lunch. Very few people even know about webtoons compared to manga; r/webtoons has 2K subscribers, r/manhwa has 5.5K, while r/manga and r/anime both have a million. Korea's animation industry is practically non-existent compared to Japan's, and their game industry isn't much better. Kpop is more internationally successful than Jpop, but that's also because Jpop just doesn't appeal to Westerners. I believe Kdramas were at some point more successful and widespread in the West, but I'm not sure what the situation is today. There are now many Jdramas on Crunchyroll and Netflix.
I'd take anything the Western media says about Japan with a big pile of salt, because they've long been pushing various doom-and-gloom narratives about a struggling Japan. Chinese animation was supposed to have upstaged the anime industry by now, according to the media.
[+] [-] httpz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techwolf|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamfc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yongjik|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] duckonomy|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] esyir|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
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
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|7 years ago|reply
Before finding webtoons she had no interest in graphic novels, comics, anime, etc. and still doesn’t. She just likes her webtoons.
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drenvuk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
They need some better VCs.
[1] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ [2] https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering-co...
[+] [-] echelon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0_gravitas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olingern|7 years ago|reply
I’d liken the ethos here to: “Move slow and never break things.”
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga
[+] [-] FrozenVoid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philliphaydon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sercand|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmlx|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syntaxing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kochikame|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
I feel old.
[+] [-] intertextuality|7 years ago|reply
You can see more of them at comic.naver.com [1]
[0]: https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=...
[1]: https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn
[+] [-] darkmarmot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yongjik|7 years ago|reply
https://www.webtoons.com/en/sf/denma/1-a-dog-of-panama-1/vie...
The original format actually looks like this:
https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=119874&no...
Disclaimer: the author is infamous for never being on time, and it's not complete yet.
[+] [-] cjsawyer|7 years ago|reply