Dominating Top Sales Rankings on Japan's Leading Comic App Markets
Kakao's 'Piccoma' and Naver's 'Line Manga' Rank 1st and 2nd
Strong Growth Expected to Continue in Second Half
[Asia Economy Reporter Jin-gyu Lee] Naver and Kakao are leading the way as 'K-content ambassadors,' elevating the status of K-webtoons in the global market. They are expanding the influence of K-webtoons not only in Japan, the world's largest comic market, but also in the United States.
According to global application analytics firm App Annie on the 15th, as of last month, Kakao's 'Piccoma' and Naver Japan subsidiary Line's 'Line Manga' ranked first and second respectively in non-game revenue rankings on Japan's two major app markets, the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Japan, known as a comic powerhouse, has a comic market size of about 5.7 trillion won, the largest in the world. Last year, for the first time ever, digital comic market sales surpassed those of paper comics.
The driving force behind Piccoma's charm to Japanese comic fans is webtoons. Piccoma receives high-quality intellectual property (IP) from KakaoPage. As of last month, webtoon works accounted for only 1.3% of Piccoma's 30,000 titles, but webtoon content transactions made up 35-40% of the total.
KakaoPage's webtoon "Solo Leveling," which has ranked first in Piccoma's sales since May last year, proved its global popularity by surpassing 10 million views on its YouTube promotional video just 12 days after the start of Season 2 serialization. "Solo Leveling" has accumulated over 450 million views domestically as a single IP to date.
"Solo Leveling," serialized not only in Korea but also in Japan, China, and English-speaking countries, recorded a cumulative 114 million views globally from March last year, when Season 1 began, until last month. KakaoPage expects that with the start of Season 2 serialization after October, both Japanese reader influx and sales will increase significantly.
Naver Webtoon is also showing rapid growth in the global market. Last month, Naver Webtoon's global monthly active users (MAU) exceeded 65 million, an increase of over 1 million users in just two months. The daily transaction amount for global paid content surpassed 3 billion won. This is just one year after breaking the 2 billion won daily transaction mark in August last year.
Naver Webtoon's flagship title "Tower of God" has led the expansion of webtoon culture by surpassing 4.5 billion cumulative views worldwide. "Tower of God" is a long-running webtoon serialized on Naver Webtoon for 10 years since 2010. It boasts a strong global fan base due to the author's ingenuity embedded throughout the work. It is translated into 11 languages including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Turkish, Chinese, and Japanese.
Along with "Tower of God," domestic webtoons such as "True Beauty" and "Lookism" are also gaining high popularity in the U.S. and Japanese markets. As loyal Naver Webtoon users increase in the U.S. market, the number of monthly payers doubled compared to the same period last year, and the payment amount per payer increased by about 50%. Consequently, Naver Webtoon recorded a monthly global paid content transaction amount of 70 billion won in May.
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