A handout shows a scene of the webtoon ‘Hellbound’ that was adopted to a popular new Netflix series"Hellbound'Byron Lee, webtoon business team leader of Naver, speaks during an interview with Reuters at a company office in SeongnamA monitor shows sketches of the webtoon ‘Hellbound’ by Choi Gyuseok at his work room in SeoulS.
"If a drama or movie fails, a bunch of people are in the red so they can't experiment in various ways. But here, when we fail, we fail alone. So we can experiment however we want," said Choi Gyu-seok, the artist and co-creator of the "Hellbound" webtoon. For the creators - who on average make 48.4 million won a year - the payoff for getting a webtoon adapted can be huge. Only about 8% of creators say their income has been substantially improved by adaptation rights, according to data from the Korea Creative Content Agency."In a month or two, I made about three or four times the amount of money I could earn a year," Hellbound's Choi said about an adaptation of a previous webtoon.
Naver's global webtoon business has seen quarterly sales jump 79% from a year ago as of July-September, and monthly active users grow from 50 million to 72 million in three years, with users outside Korea far outweighing those in Korea and global streaming services' adaptations helping expand the market, Naver's Lee said.