Illegal Webtoon and Web Novel Sites Receive 260 Million Visitors per Month

Kang Yujeong "Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism Shows Weak Will to Eradicate Copyright Protection Agency"

The number of visitors to illegal webtoon and web novel sites exceeded 200 million in August alone.

On the 17th, Kang Yoo-jung, a member of the National Assembly's Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee from the Democratic Party, disclosed the results of an analysis of traffic on five major illegal webtoon sites and one web novel site using the statistics site SimilarWeb. According to the data, the number of site visitors in August reached 260 million. Even after excluding duplicate IP addresses, the number was as high as 12.2 million. The number of page views, an indicator showing how much users consumed illegal content, was counted at 2.25 billion.

In particular, the largest illegal webtoon site, 'Newtoki,' had 130 million visitors and 1.15 billion webtoon page views. Calculating the damage amount from illegal distribution by multiplying the number of visitors by the webtoon rental fee (300 won) results in an estimated damage of approximately 39.8 billion won during this period.

Assemblyman Kang pointed out that investigations are difficult because illegal webtoon and web novel sites have servers overseas, and criticized the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Copyright Protection Agency for their weak determination to eradicate them. "Illegal webtoon and web novel sites like Newtoki evade crackdowns by changing their internet addresses (URLs), but the government has no countermeasures," she said. She added, "Webtoons and web novels are 'snack culture' content that, once consumed, are rarely re-consumed, so the value of initial consumption is important," emphasizing that "it is urgent for the government to seek solutions to protect copyrights."