Part 24. Webtoons and Web Novels — The Brilliant Invention of “Wait Until Free”

Core question: Why was it revolutionary to let people buy free content with time?

The Day Comic-Rental Shops Disappeared

In the 1990s, Korean neighborhoods had comic-rental shops—about thirty thousand nationwide. Renting one comic cost ₩50–100, or ₩200 for a thick volume. Stopping after school and taking three or four books home was routine.

The revenue structure was simple. Readers lined up for popular series such as The Ruler of the Land, Slam Dunk, and Dragon Ball. A reservation list appeared as soon as a new volume arrived. Waiting was normal, and money could shorten it: pay more to read first.

In the early 2000s, broadband internet spread together with scanlation—scanning comics and uploading them online without authorization, especially through Japanese-manga fan communities. Rental shops suffered twice. People formed a habit of reading free digital files, while internet shopping diversified the ways to buy physical books.

The number of rental shops collapsed in the 2010s, from roughly thirty thousand to several thousand: about five thousand in 2010 and fewer than one thousand by 2020. More than 80 percent disappeared each decade. The decline mirrored the growth curve of Naver Webtoon’s monthly visitors in the opposite direction. The payment-habit space of waiting and borrowing seemed to vanish.

It did not vanish. It migrated into digital space.

Three Branches of the Earlier Habit-Space

Comic-rental shops produced three behavioral patterns.

First was waiting. A popular comic required a wait. The inconvenience also increased value: the longer the line, the stronger the desire.

Second was small payment. Readers rented rather than bought for ₩100 or ₩200, an amount easy to try and cheap to regret.

Third was the serialization habit. Readers following magazine series kept a weekly or monthly rhythm of waiting for the next installment. Weekly Shonen Jump, founded in 1968, sustained that rhythm for decades. Korean children’s and educational comic magazines used the same structure.

Waiting, micro-payments, and serialization migrated into webtoon and web-novel platforms.

Naver Webtoon — Capturing the Market with Free Serialization

Naver Webtoon, launched in 2004, was free from the beginning. One year earlier, Kang Full’s Love Story began free serialization on Daum’s Comics in the World. Readers paid nothing. At the time, giving it away was hard to understand.

The response was explosive. Love Story recorded millions of daily views during serialization, then became a high-ranking bookstore bestseller in print in 2004. It was an early case of online audience building migrating back into offline publishing—the platform validated the market before a publisher did.

The reason was platform preemption: attract readers for free and establish a habit of consuming webtoons first. Once the habit exists, the IP gains value; monetization can come later.

The strategy worked. Naver Webtoon drew millions of daily visitors by the late 2000s. Flagship titles such as Cho Seok’s The Sound of Your Heart (2006) and Kim Kyu-sam’s Jungle High School (2006) taught readers to wait for weekly updates.

Early paid conversion was not smooth. Naver opened free comics in October 2000, converted them to paid “coin” transactions in 2002, and experienced backlash and departures. Sudden charging after a free habit forms drives users away—the same structure CNN+ would later encounter.

Naver Webtoon changed the timing. Early access before free release let readers use paid cookies to unlock upcoming installments. The platform monetized a desire to see the next episode sooner after the free habit already existed.

Naver Webtoon, or Webtoon Entertainment, prepared for a New York listing in 2023. It served more than 150 countries and had 170 million global monthly active users, with roughly six million daily visitors in Korea. A cookie costs ₩100. In 2022, transactions on Naver Series, its integrated webtoon and web-novel platform, reached about ₩400 billion. Paying users spent an average ₩10,000–30,000 a month. The unit price is low, but immersed readers commonly consume hundreds of cookies monthly.

KakaoPage — The Brilliant Invention of “Wait Until Free”

KakaoPage, launched in 2013, introduced “Wait Until Free” in 2014, one of the most original modern digital-content business models.

The structure is simple. Episode one is free. For the next episode, users choose to wait or pay. Wait twenty-four hours and it becomes free; buy a pass with cash and read immediately. Free-pass events encourage return visits. A user who reopens the app for a pass naturally discovers another title or tops up cash.

It looks like a simple unlocking method, but its core is that it turns time into currency. Those without money pay with time. Why is that revolutionary?

Earlier models offered a binary choice: pay or do not watch. KakaoPage added a third: pay with time instead of money. This creates the perception that content is “free,” lowering resistance to entry. Once readers begin, curiosity makes them wait, and waiting brings them back.

Returning readers see ads. Watching one may earn a coupon that removes the wait; alternatively, readers can top up cash and unlock immediately. They choose among watching an ad, paying money, or waiting.

That three-way choice is the essence of “Wait Until Free.” Readers paying a time cost, an attention cost, or cash coexist on one platform.

Transactions on the integrated KakaoPage and Kakao Entertainment service reached roughly ₩1 trillion in 2022. Its global service Piccoma ranked first by revenue in Japan’s App Store in 2021. Estimated 2022 transactions were about ¥90 billion, roughly ₩850 billion, surpassing Naver affiliate LINE Manga. Korean platforms held the top two positions in Japan’s manga-app market. Piccoma first exceeded ¥100 billion annually in 2023. The model worked the same way in Japan.

Web Novels — The Gacha Economy of Cookies and Points

Web novels are one step closer to games than webtoons.

Services such as Munpia (2012), Joara (1998), KakaoPage, and Naver Series charge per episode. One cookie on Naver Series costs ₩100; KakaoPage uses cash; an episode costs roughly ₩100–300.

That sits in the same psychological range as renting a comic for ₩100–200: a microtransaction that feels insignificant. Curiosity makes it hard to stop, and “just use my last three cookies” repeats. The psychology resembles game gacha.

Consumption studies find many immersed readers spending hundreds of thousands of won in a short period. Korean genres such as regression stories, martial arts, hunter fiction, and other-world fantasy intensify immersion. As the protagonist grows and the next scene draws closer, cookies disappear.

Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, serialized by the pen name Sing Shong on Munpia beginning in 2018, gathered hundreds of thousands of paying readers. Kakao Entertainment acquired the IP, adapted it into a KakaoPage webtoon, and signed a film deal in 2022 for a production budgeted in the tens of billions of won. It is a textbook Korean sequence: web novel to webtoon to film.

IPs beginning as web novels—including Overgeared (2016), The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, and Solo Leveling—expanded into webtoons, games, and animation. Solo Leveling received a Japanese anime adaptation by A-1 Pictures in January 2024, simulcast globally by Crunchyroll. It remained high in Crunchyroll’s rankings during its first three months, alongside a multi-IP strategy linked to Netmarble’s mobile game.

A Structure Where Amateurs Become Professionals

Munpia and Joara created an ecosystem where readers can also become writers.

Authors begin with free serialization and switch to paid serialization when response is strong. Platforms share revenue; Kakao Entertainment distributes roughly 50–70 percent to writers. Some popular authors earn tens of millions of won a month from serialization alone.

Traditional novelists had to pass the publisher gatekeeper. Web-novel platforms removed it. Reader votes became the gatekeeper.

Views, comments, and paid subscribers determine whether a work lives. Platforms expose popular titles more heavily; larger audiences raise author income. It is the creator economy of YouTube operating through text rather than music or video.

Korea’s web-novel market reached about ₩1 trillion in 2022, with Kakao Entertainment and Naver Series sharing more than half. Tens of thousands of authors serialize online. Only some earn meaningful revenue, but top writers surpass established salaried professionals.

A Korean Particularity — From Rental-Shop Collapse to Digital Rental and an Ownership-Free Economy

One reason Korea’s webtoon and web-novel ecosystem became the world’s most developed is its comic-rental culture.

Japan has a strong manga-purchase culture in which owning volumes forms part of fan identity. The United States has comic-book collecting. Korea, however, made borrowing mainstream and established consumption without ownership.

That habit transferred easily into digital space. “Borrow, read, return” became “spend a cookie, read, move to the next episode.” The premise that ownership was unnecessary already existed.

Piccoma’s Japanese success is paradoxical. Even where physical ownership was strong, the appeal of free exceeded earlier payment habits. Piccoma did not land on empty ground. LINE Manga and comico, both launched in 2013, and Shonen Jump+ in 2014 had already created a habit of free smartphone serialization. Piccoma, launched in 2016, layered “Wait Until Free” on top and reorganized the market.

Piccoma’s estimated 2022 transactions of ¥90 billion, about ₩850 billion, made the Japanese subsidiary a major part of Kakao Entertainment. A Korean business model became number one in the country with the deepest tradition of buying manga volumes.

IP Expansion — From Webtoon to Drama and Back Again

The greatest value of webtoons and web novels lies in pre-testing.

Traditional drama production invests tens or hundreds of billions of won before seeing audience response. A webtoon original changes the risk: hundreds of thousands of readers have already validated the story, and comments, views, and paying-reader counts become indicators.

Itaewon Class (2020), based on Gwangjin’s webtoon, ranked first in Korea after its global Netflix release. True Beauty (2020), based on Yaongyi’s Naver Webtoon, became a tvN drama. Moving (2023), based on Kang Full’s webtoon, set a Korean OTT viewership record after its Disney+ release.

Solo Leveling (2024) completed the cycle: web novel, webtoon, Japanese anime distributed globally through Crunchyroll and Aniplex, and game. Payment habits built by web-novel readers transferred across media.

As of 2023, Kakao Entertainment held more than forty thousand IPs and represented more than ten thousand writers. That is its most important asset. While Netflix spent $17 billion on originals, Kakao drew already tested IP from Korea’s distinctive webtoon and web-novel ecosystem.

Essential Failure Case 1 — Lezhin Comics’ Challenge and Crisis

Lezhin Comics, founded in 2013, took another path as a paid adult-webtoon platform. It charged subscriptions or coins from the beginning without free serialization.

Early response was strong because it offered adult content absent elsewhere. But tighter adult-content regulation in 2016 struck directly. Repeated sanctions from Korea’s communications regulator blocked core titles, and paying readers canceled.

The crisis also came from within. In 2017–2018, delayed settlements, “late fees” imposed on artists for delayed manuscripts, and allegations of a blacklist tracking protesting artists damaged creator trust. In 2018, the company promised to return part of the collected fees and prevent recurrence.

Regulation and trust were not the only problems. Lezhin attempted paid content without first building a platform-scale free audience. Unlike Naver, which monetized after gathering tens of millions of free readers, Lezhin had to recruit paying readers immediately. It exposed the limits of demanding payment before a habit forms.

Lezhin survived by strengthening non-adult content and adapting to regulation, maintaining hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors in 2022. Its paid model continued, but growth slowed and never recovered its initial explosion.

Essential Failure Case 2 — Naver’s Early Paid-Comics Experiment

Naver’s first monetization attempt also belongs among the failures.

It opened free comic viewing in October 2000, then converted to paid electronic “coins” in early 2002. Readers nearly rejected it. Previously free content suddenly carried a price, and the largely underage audience lacked payment methods. The sentiment was: “Why charge for something that was free?”

The lesson is clear: a payment habit established as free is extremely difficult to convert. Resistance is not merely “too expensive,” but a sense of betrayal over something that used to cost nothing. Netflix could restrict password sharing in 2023 and still gain subscribers only because years of paid habit had formed first.

Naver Webtoon eventually succeeded by positioning payment as an additional service: “see the next episode sooner.” It preserved service for free readers and layered a premium on top without violating the existing habit.

Expansion of the Global Webtoon Market

Korean webtoons also went global by transferring payment habits.

Tapas, founded in 2012, is a US webtoon and web-novel platform. Kakao Entertainment acquired Tapas and Radish together in 2021. Radish was an English-language web-novel app founded in 2016 by Korean entrepreneur Lee Seung-yoon. Their combined acquisition price was estimated at about $950 million, securing North American and English-language entry in one move.

Wattpad, founded in 2006, grew from web novels to ninety million global users and more than one billion uploaded stories. Naver completed its acquisition for $600 million in 2021. More than eighty Wattpad stories had already become films or dramas. Naver acquired both a reader community and an IP pool.

The targets were not simply content, but reader communities: the regular customers of comic-rental shops migrated online, and platforms bought the communities where they gathered.

The global webtoon market was estimated at about $4.4 billion in 2023, with Korean content and platforms accounting for a substantial share.

Hint Points

What can webtoon and web-novel payment habits teach us?

First, time can become currency. “Wait Until Free” did not lower price; it diversified payment methods. Readers without money pay with time, while readers without time pay with money. Both remain inside the platform.

Second, microtransactions create large revenue. Roughly ₩100 per episode feels trivial. Repeated “this is nothing” decisions commonly accumulate into tens of thousands of won a month.

Third, gather readers first and monetize later. Naver gathered tens of millions of readers before adding a paid layer. Lezhin followed a different path by attempting payment before it had an audience, with a different result.

To apply the structure, ask: Does my content have a layer equivalent to “Wait Until Free”? Can one version be consumed with time instead of money, while payment shortens the wait?

Putting your name on a reservation list for the next comic volume and spending the last remaining cookie in a web novel are different names for the same habit. New business models are not invented. They migrate.

Kim Dongeun · WhtDrgon@MEJE.kr · 2026