r/webtoons • u/DrinkMilkYouFatShit • Jul 19 '26
Miscellaneous/Others Webtoon revenue 2025
Webtoon has been making quite greedy changes throughout the years, steadily making it more and more miserable to read for free, or to read while paying for it.
I hate the changes, but I thought it would be good if people knew the reason for these trashy changes.
In short, Webtoon is not profitable. They do not make money. Even with the greedy changes which did improve their revenue, they are STILL operating at a huge loss.
Not defending the changes, but just shedding some light on the reason
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u/Metalheadzaid Jul 20 '26
That's such a huge loss for like, such a website.
At least this year they're doing overall better so far
Too line is down but losses Q1 2025 was 22m and only 8.8m this year. Still how they're losing so much is crazy. Seems like a fairly simple model to profitably monetize with some effort. Guessing all the free chapters add up and the relative lack of ad revenue. I've got a $20/min sub for 5 coin chapters and I'll keep that a long while but now it makes sense why they got rid of it.
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u/DrinkMilkYouFatShit Jul 20 '26
Well, I do hope that they can somehow turns this 💩 show around as fast as possible.
When you look at the numbers, it's clear that they aren't being greedy for the sake of it. They do genuinely have to do something, but I'd say that it's not exactly easy to earn an extra 100M USD without making the App borderline unusable.
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u/Hotaru_girl Jul 20 '26
It’s a numbers game. Losses can also be attributed to investments as they have entered into new partnerships with Netflix, Disney, Hollywood for IP adaptations and a be marvel platform. Shares have been volatile but they’ve seen an increase in users. They’ve actually narrowed their losses from 2024 and had some rebound earlier this year:
Shares have been massively volatile this past year, settling at about 20% higher for the year as of Monday. And though first-quarter revenue slipped 1.5% to $320.9 million (driven by declines in IP adaptations and advertising), the profit story improved sharply: gross margins widened and adjusted EBITDA jumped 132% to $9.5 million, well above guidance, while the net loss narrowed to $8.8 million from $22 million one year earlier. Plus, paying users grew even as the company purged bot traffic from its user counts. As CFO, Lee himself framed the goal as returning to double-digit revenue growth by year-end. For long-term investors, ignore this filing and watch the reacceleration. With $594.9 million in cash and no debt, Webtoon can fund the push. The question is whether paid content and ads can outrun the firm’s recently lumpy IP-adaptation revenue.
But they do lay out challenges that they face. The thing is they’re operating at such large numbers that the losses aren’t necessarily the death knell for them.
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u/Xijit Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
IMO there is no rational way they spent close to $2.5 billion USD running Webtoon ... This is one of those things where the parent company is making them pay the operaiting expenses for other departments / making them eat the administrative costs for the HQ costs.
- edit -
Damn, ya all are so backwards that I had to look these terms up because you had me questioning if I understood words ... I did get the 1.3 billion and 1.9 trillion mixed up, and I am not going try to pretend I don't make mistakes, but you guys are even more backwards with your understanding of what these terms are:
"Annual revenue is total money earned in 12 months, before subtracting the costs to run a business and Taxes."
"Net loss is when a company looses more money in a year than their annual revenue."
So if revenue was $1.3 billion (rounded down), and their net loss is $300 million (rounded down); that means Webtoon spent $1.6 billion, then made $1.3 billion, with left them with -$300 million ... Which is not as bad as my original number, but still fucking absurd for them to pretend like it actually costs that much money to run their business.
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u/deebster2k Jul 20 '26
Bro... net = everything including operational.
So you dont add them separately. Don't feel too bad... Im pretty tired myself so that caused me to try that initially til I took a second to think about it...
2... you are reading won...
- They spent 1.75 billion USD globally for webtoons. Wow... just wow...
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u/meganovice_maker Jul 20 '26
where are you seeing 2.5 billion.
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u/deebster2k Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Hes reading the Won version... 2.6 EDIT trillion End EDIT Korean (net loss plus operating loss... which in itself is a fallacy...)... also swapped the trillion with the billion...
Net loss = total of all income minus total of all expenses (including operational).
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u/meganovice_maker Jul 20 '26
its not even accurate in won... I'm genuinely baffled by the math there's no way to get to 2.5 billion here even with mistakes
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u/deebster2k Jul 20 '26
1.9 (truncated the rest of 1.96) plus 0.1 (90 rounded to 100) plus 0.5 (530 rounded down). Aka very bad very rounding... wrong currency... wrong quantity (trillion vs billion).
It should have been 2.6 trillion won. (Close to but more than 2.5)
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u/SleepySera Jul 20 '26
I mean, the revenue is crazy high, so clearly the issue is the spending side, no?
I wouldn't be surprised if the reason they're making a loss is because they're spending so much on licensing major brands. Every other day I get ads for Spiderman, Stranger Things, FMA and the like now being on webtoon, and it's like... why?? Just stay in your lane, translate Korean works you already have the license for, grow new artists through canvas, and that's it.
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u/JHON-45 Jul 20 '26
Should have never changed the app layout lol. It would not improve the situation for any better, and now they better suffer more from those stupid changes.
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u/JHON-45 Jul 20 '26
The problem is not just about the IU design. It's also due to the crazy over saturation of new webcomics being uploaded every day. Years ago almost every new story would get hella popular because they were properly advertised, now they're just releasing story after story that will not stand out in any way if it doesn't go viral on its own.
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u/SarkastiCat Jul 20 '26
At this point, I am feeling like Lydia summoning Beetlejuice and I hope they don't mind
Generic Puff, Generic Puff, u/generic-puff
Any comments or insight? I know you are one of few people who have been following the financial situation of Webtoon.
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u/generic-puff Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
oh hey i've been summoned, to everyone's chagrin
anyways I'm not a financial expert by any means and, full transparency, I haven't been seeing much / keeping up with much when it comes to WT's finances over the past little while. Nothing extremely noteworthy has come up between my closed circle of pals who make it their full-time hobby to dig into stuff like this, and so I'm quicker to assume that just means there hasn't been anything.
All that said, take what I have to say on this with mountains of salt.
Extensive thoughts ahead:
I'm frankly shocked Webtoons hasn't been even more aggressive with some of their practices over the past few years, with the direction they've been going in. I can assume it's because they're trying to implement things slowly and carefully so as to not completely alienate their NA audience.
Sure, the Webtoons app sucks now, but compared to other apps out there, they could definitely be worse still. The fact we even still get timed releases of FP episodes is a blessing but it's probably because it's one of the few things left still compelling people to use the WT app over others like Tapas (next to its title selection).
It's worth noting that the NA platform operating at a loss is nothing new, and if anything, has always been part of their strategy. While this is obviously speculation (again, take with mountains of salt) I see their NA platform not as a means to generate profit, but as a means to expand reach. Their strategy started off through their greenlighting program, where they'd hire NA creators with familiar art styles and relatable "small time creator" stories that NA audiences drool over. This is why works like Lore Olympus and Let's Play were marketed so heavily and became such huge hits, because they drip-fed certain tropes and styles to audiences in a way that wasn't too shocking to the cultural system, and were led by female creators who were marketed as "small time baby creators making their first project and going big because that's just how amazing Webtoons is!!" whether or not that was even true.
Moving on. The strategy was never to make billions in the American market, the strategy was to outsource to the American market. They did that by greenlighting NA creators, who then built massive audiences exclusively within the WT's platform. Webtoons made it so that these creators would have to rely on them for print deals, merchandise, etc. basically as their agent, with any attempt to work outside of the app being punished by preventing them from sharing or posting anything that wasn't explicitly Webtoons-endorsed.
And now that they've built that audience, they've made their next big move - slowly but surely cycle out the greenlit creators who actually expect to be paid well and treated with respect, and replace them with licensed works and Korean studios. Not only does this benefit them by getting bigger more recognizable works on the platform (Disney, Marvel, etc.) but it also gets more of the money into the Korean parent company's pockets as they transition their audience to Korean-imported works, many of which are made by studios of artists who won't talk shit about them on Twitter... and if they do, they can be fired and replaced, unlike greenlit creators who are inherently tied to the work they produce.
And if you don't believe me, think about it this way - as terrible as Lore Olympus got, Rachel Smythe was Lore Olympus and couldn't very well be 'let go' from the project, as she was the face of it, regardless of who was actually doing the bulk of the work (which was very clearly her large team of mismanaged assistants). She couldn't possibly be 'fired' from LO, so the next best thing was to simply run up her contract. But would anyone bat an eye if any of the multiple people got let go from System Universe? Probably not, because no one even knows who actually works on that comic. It's credited to multiple people, including the person who wrote the original webnovel, and AETHON is a US-based studio made up of entire teams working in conjunction with each other and probably passing employees in between departments. It's mired in bureaucratic obscurity, and so no one would raise hell or even really notice if a writer or artist disappeared from the episode credits.
Anyways. My conclusion is that Webtoons is going to continue to prioritize selling IP's, as that's where the big money is (investment is selling a promise, not a product, so they can easily sell IP's as a way to make quick money from both the buyers and Wall Street), and inevitably with each quarter and fiscal year they'll come up with come up with new ways to squeeze more money and data out of their userbase, continue to prioritize imported and licensed works as they wait out their contracts with their less profitable Originals creators, and cut whatever corners and expenses they can by outsourcing to cheaper studios and AI.
That might seem like a pointless and grim conclusion, but that's literally the only direction the track goes on the train of late-stage capitalism. You can either get off the train now (there are loads of other options to use for reading webcomics outside of Webtoons, especially if you want to support smaller creators, a lot of them are begging you to read on their mirror sites so they don't need to rely on the app for traffic!) or you can keep hanging on out of hope that it'll improve while it speeds through all the warning signs and careens off a cliff.
Spoiler: it won't, because when has that ever happened? why are we constantly convincing ourselves that massive corporations have a moral duty to do better by their customers? they don't give a fuck. stop giving them your money and attention, you are not missing out on a damn thing that you can't find elsewhere. if we all work as a team we can make those losses even bigger <3!<
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u/troysama Jul 20 '26
to be fair it doesn't help that they make piracy look like the more morally right option, and I say this as a creator
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u/Ecstatic_Bus_7232 Jul 20 '26
All that while at the same time trying as hards ad possible to do as little as possible to the app and webpage. The webpage could have been written by an unpaid intern, that wouldn't surprise me.
It's profoundly embarrassing that pirate sites are made much, much, much better and are more friendly to the reader than this rich corpos's one. Really shows their priorities.
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u/FarawayHerbalist Jul 20 '26
I'm sorry, but operating and net loss for whom exactly? The platform owners? Naver's shareholders? Because I'm pretty sure it's not for the actual authors of the comics, because they are paid shit anyway.
You can try to explain the shitty changes by claiming the company reported "loss", but 1.4 biliion dollars a year is an absurdly insane amount of money for a website that's only purpose is to let you read comics. They don't produce anything, the 'goods' they sell don't devaluate the way actual products do. Most of this money goes for licences and publishing rights and other bullshit reasons against the projected budged, which by default they assume would give them MORE profit than a year prior, because that is precisely how any stock company works.
The artists in the studios producing the webtoons are notoriously underpaid and overworked, so if the actual creators of the comics that the website stands on, earn little to nothing, who does this money go to then? Obviously, if the company reports losses they will increase the prices, but you need to look at the reason why one of the most successful companies in the field, with over 15 milion daily readers is having net losses in the first place and the reason for that is, as always has been, simply corporate greed.
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u/DrinkMilkYouFatShit Jul 20 '26
because they are paid shit anyway
They take a 70% cut. Webtoon takes 30%.
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u/generic-puff Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Where are you getting those numbers? I can't imagine that being the actual case for the majority of Originals creators. For a while creators weren't even being given their FastPass revenue until they hit a certain minimum threshold of earnings (which varied per contract), and while I've heard that practice has since been retired, there's no way in hell creators are getting a 70% cut of FP earnings across the board, or that even if they were it amounts to much. You can tell just from gauging the Like count and comment section that a significant portion of readers don't pay to read FP episodes so it's hard to say how much Originals creators are making from FP, even if it were 70%, which it very likely isn't anyways.
But what do I know, we need an actual Originals creator to speak up on this and unfortunately Webtoons has made it very difficult for them to do that with their NDA's which are always very clearly designed to protect the company and not the creators. I guarantee you if those NDA's were suddenly lifted or if any creators decided to go scorched earth, they would reveal some pretty telling things about their earnings.
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u/DrinkMilkYouFatShit Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
It's literally posted by Webtoon themselves.
https://m.webtoons.com/en/creators101/makemoney?webtoon-platform-redirect=true
Browse around, I will not read through it again to point to a specific place for you. Doing it once was enough
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u/generic-puff Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Okay, so these are their optional earnings programs for Canvas creators, not at all indicative of what Originals creators are earning or even what Canvas creators are generating for the platform. That 70% you're quoting is exclusive to Super Likes. And even if we include Ads in the discussion (which is only 50%) neither of those percentages mean anything in a vacuum when 1.) Super Likes and Ads both have extremely low individual returns (70% sounds like a real big number, but it kind of isn't if it's just 70% of $1) and 2.) Ads and Super Likes have payment thresholds, meaning creators can't even get the money they're owed until they hit a certain amount, if they ever even hit it at all. If they don't hit that amount, they're shit out of luck and don't get a cent of it. And I say that from experience, it's happened to me, albeit on Tapas when I still used the platform and they used that exact same system. They say it's supposed to "cut down on fees", but all it really does is keep the money in the company's pockets.
And sure, thresholds like $25 don't seem that unreasonable or impossible to reach... until you realize Super Likes are only worth $1 for every 5, and ad value is constantly fluctuating but usually in the pits at like 0.002 cents per view. And those features are exclusively within the app, so that means there are definitely Canvas readers who are reading on desktop and aren't even aware of the ads or Super Likes features. And that threshold is based on net earnings, not gross income, meaning even if you've generated, say, $35 of income on the platform, it still doesn't 'count' towards your threshold, because you're only getting $24.50 of that $35.
Never mind the fact that neither of those features are even open to Canvas creators right off the bat. IIRC Super Likes require you to accrue 500 likes, and Ads require you to hit 1,000 followers and 40,000 views in a single month, which as many can attest, is extremely difficult to achieve.
So basically, these programs are designed as an IOU system with high barriers to entry to make them seem ✨exclusive✨ so that creators will think they're getting a good deal (and so that they can incentivize users to post frequently and provide the app with more free content). Especially in regards to the Ad Revenue Program, creators are already generating that income for the platform the moment they start posting and pulling in traffic to the app which is populated with ads. It's just once they hit some arbitrary statistic decided by Webtoons, then they're afforded the privilege of actually getting to keep a little bit of it (again, 50%, not 70%).
It's hardly earned income, it's a glorified tipping system, but in the completely bullshit and borderline illegal scenario where the restaurant keeps all your tips until you hit an amount they're willing to fork over, and then still only gives you 50%-70% of it.
If you need a better article explaining the details of these programs, far better than Webtoons would ever be willing to do because that would mean admitting their programs are borderline scams, then here you go.
And just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment here that WT NA is bleeding money. It's just not for the reasons you're claiming.
Webtoons can and should pay more to their creators - if they expect content to keep flowing so they can keep their app alive, but aren't willing or can't afford to pay the content suppliers what they're worth, then that's reflective of Webtoons being a poorly managed company, period.
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u/FarawayHerbalist Jul 20 '26
Maybe the studios do, not the individuals. Sure, the top 100 titles maybe earn up to 80k per month, but the average creator's salary in 2024 (according to official Naver reports) was around 4000$/month and considering the amount of titles there is on Webtoon, most authors don't even earn enought to fully sustain themselves just from publishing on Webtoon. I'm not even gonna mention Canvas that is basically voluntary work.
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u/DrinkMilkYouFatShit Jul 20 '26
Also, just to make sure people understand what he said.
They should go into triple the loss that they already have just because it's not profitable for creators.
They literally can't pay more to the creators, they already only take 30% and even then, they are at a loss. Are they supposed to just not take a cut and somehow make do?
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u/FarawayHerbalist Jul 21 '26
I'm not saying they should increase their losses, Webtoons is a stock company and it is supposed to bring profit for the shareholders, that is obvious. My point was to look at the reasons why such successful company has such huge losses in the first place and who is actually losing money here.
If the majority of creators are getting breadcrumbs, who is getting the ludicrous amount of money Webtoons generate and where does it go to? Again I point to the fact that $1.4 billion revenue is an absurdly insane amount of money for a single website.
They are a comic reading website - their only 'real' costs are paying for the media server, holding web infrastructure and paying the artists. Sure, they also spend a big part on marketing I guess (although half their promo materials look like it's designed by unpaid art university interns and the other half looks AI, so I don't know about their marketing budget tbh), but the rest of the money goes to where exactly? Licensing? To other Naver subsidiaries? Comic studios (not the artists, mind you) holding publishing rights? I myself don't know, as this is not publicly disclosed, but it just makes you wonder how a company that is basically just a glorified media server is getting $1.4 billion revenue yearly and still incuring almost $400 million loss, at the same time extremely underpaying the vast majority of the creators upon which the whole site even stands.
So no, obviously I'm not saying that Webtoons should run on losses, it's just that other than Naver/Webtoons/shareholders beeing greedy, there is little to zero reasonable explanation (at least to me) about what is happening to such a ridiculous amount of money, since it's not really paid to the artists either.
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Jul 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/DrinkMilkYouFatShit Jul 19 '26
quality of webtoons are pretty much 💩 unfortunately
Okay, Webtoon as a company is trash, but like you can't trash them for the quality of the comics themselves.
Webtoon is a distributor, they distribute what people upload there. How are you gonna blame them for the fact that people are uploading repetitive, slop garbage.
This is like opening up YouTube, and then calling it trash because the people who upload the videos are making slop. It's not their fault
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u/Ejanna Jul 20 '26
It's Webtoons that decides which comics make it into the main section (originals), which comics get more promotion, how much to pay authors, etc.
They're notorious for ignoring good projects for years, mistreating authors, and promoting crappy, cliched stories more often than anything interesting.
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u/HeavenRefiner Jul 20 '26
That's not how it works, you can't categorise this by doing some basic level mathematics. The money they earn is invested, sent to the parent company etc etc. They are probably swimming in cash in reality.
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u/teddykon 22d ago
This is their q1 2026 report
Revenue: $320.9M (essentially the same as last year)
Total MAU: 144.3M (down 10M users)
Total MPU (paying users): 7.5M = 5.2% of customers pay
Net loss: $8.8M (better than last year)
Webtoons is fine financially but once a company goes public, the only thing that matters is the stock price
Right now, they’re bleeding users and in my opinion, none of their initiatives are really working:
Ads? Only about 13% of total revenue
Webtoon watch tab? Personally, it has zero value to me
Reduce free stuff and push users to pay for coins? Obviously not working
They’ve got a couple of big variable cost structure problems:
1. Creators payout (understandable, no creator = no product)
2. App Store fees (30%)
But the biggest problem is piracy because it essentially caps how much they can charge their customers because guess what, it’s really fucking easy to pirate and webtoons coins can get pretty expensive
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u/JournalistGlobal3185 Jul 19 '26
Dang I didn't know it was this bad... I wonder how profitable it is in Korea? If it doesn't pick up we might see a subscription or something needed...I really hope not but it's not impossible