Written by: Sonishma Basnet - 2022021, Grade X
Posted on: 24 January, 2021
Line webtoon or simply webtoon is an app or a site created in 2004 by Jun Koo Kim. It is a website where people read manhwa and manga online. Comics are the stories that are presented through the drawings. Manhwas are comics created in Korea and manga are comics from Japan. In the 1990s and early 2000s, these were really popular and had a big market as the internet and television were not used much. Comics were made into books and people used to wait and buy each part individually because of which it was getting inconvenient because of which webtoons were created. Webtoons are a type of digital comic that originated in South Korea. As digital manhwa has emerged as a popular medium, the print publication of manhwa in South Korea has decreased. The amount of material published in webtoon form has now reached an equal amount as that published offline
This site was originally published in naver.com but never released on global platforms in 2014 AD as Naver is not quite well known in the international market. Kim first created it due to the increasing popularity of manhwa and mangas back in the days and because fewer of them were released, he thought scrolling it in the web browser would be what people would like more. Currently, webtoon is the #1 webcomic app and there are 55 million readers each month. As of July 1, 2019, it gets over 100 billion views each year. Webtoon has hundreds of creators and webcomics. The most popular webtoon is lore Olympics, unordinary, true beauty, let's play, tower of god, freaking romance, save me, age matters, etc. creator on the platform also earn a decent amount of income. Here each page gaining more than 40,000 views earns around $100. It increases even more through advertisements as in 2013 webtoon had created a Profit Page Share program. This compensation program allows artists to get a larger profit through advertisements or their own personal stores but is shared between NHN Corp and the artists themselves. Also, popular webtoons are made into dramas or movies through which creators earn even more.
This webtoon is a really good platform for reading and spending time for the users and a way for artists to publish their work and make money out of it. Since webtoons have a really good international market, creators from all over the world can join it and show off their talent. There are also contests for people to work on.
