WEBTOON Reveals Average Salary of Professional Creators

WEBTOON revealed that the average annual salary for professional creators on the platform is $48,000, adding that the top 100 creators earn $1 million annually. The company disclosed this in its filing to the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) ahead of WEBTOON’s proposed listing on the NASDAQ Global Select Market.

In addition to the WEBTOON average salary, the filing adds that the platform has paid out $2.8 billion to creators from 2017 to 2023 and shared important data about its global reach. On average, users spend 30 minutes on WEBTOON and read between 5-10 episodes per day, while collectively over 170 million users use the platform, leaving around 1 million comments across all titles monthly.

North America comprises around 11.8% of WEBTOON’s monthly active users or 20 million people. 75% of users are Gen Z (as of Dec. 2023). Paid Content (where users pay to unlock content) generated 80.2% of WEBTOON’s revenue. Half of WEBTOON’s users are based outside Korea, Japan, and North America.

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While WEBTOON’s importance in the webcomics space already couldn’t be underestimated, they revealed the platform was #1 in Korea, North America, and Japan, also ranking “first in multiple geographies throughout Southeast Asia and Europe in terms of monthly active users.”

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Their stature becomes especially important in light of growing concerns about the treatment of its creators. LySandra Vuong, the author of the Covenant webtoon claimed that WEBTOON barred them from promoting the print edition of their series.

This was purportedly because Oni Press, rather than WEBTOON, holds the rights to the print version. Vuong said the practice was inconsistent, and followed a general lack of support, “unfairly age gating my comic,” and denied raises, all of which “completely destroyed my mental health.”

Source: SEC
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