Our Vision To be the world’s storytelling technology platform empowering creation by anyone, for everyone. WEBTOON is a global storytelling platform where a vibrant community of creators and users discover, create and share new content. We have pioneered a cultural movement by revolutionizing the storytelling format and democratizing content creation and publication. WEBTOON empowers creators by enabling them to participate economically in their own creation, and users, by offering an endless library of content. Our community connects 24 million creators with approximately 170 million monthly active users in over 150 countries around the world(1). Our founder, Junkoo Kim, started WEBTOON in 2005 while he was working as a search engineer at NAVER, the largest internet company in Korea. Junkoo was a lifelong lover of comics and their rich and vibrant worlds and diverse characters. He wanted to create a platform that empowered creators to share stories and for fans, like himself, to discover this unique content. Instead of a traditional storytelling format, confined to a page or screen, he pioneered something different. Through serialized releases of bite-sized episodes available online, he created a format that was not only easily accessible and highly engaging for fans, but also easier for creators to create and share with a wide audience. WEBTOON initially focused almost entirely on seeding differentiated content and fostering user engagement until we began our Paid Content business model in 2012 and then began operating as an independent unit within NAVER in 2017. Though our roots are in Korea, we have built a truly global platform in the nearly two decades since our founding, broadening the reach and impact of our creators and their content. Content on our platform tells stories created by our creators through multiple immersive formats. On our platform, creators tell long-form stories through our iconic serialized narratives in the form of short-form, bite-sized episodes. This content format results in a habitual behavior with an engaged user base. These stories are told primarily in two ways—web-comics, a graphical comic-like medium, and web-novels, which are text-based stories. The web-comicmedium tells stories using a continuous vertical-scroll format that is easily read on mobile devices. For both formats, the serialized release of content is analogous to chapters of a book. These formats are not only accessible and highly engaging for fans, but also easier for creators to create, share and monetize their stories. We are able to further extend the reach, impact and monetization of our content by adapting it into other media formats such as film, streaming series, games, merchandise and print books. Over the past decade, we have adapted over 900 titles, including over 100 streaming series and films, more than 200 books, over 70 games and over 11 million consumer product units as of March 31, 2024. Creators power our content engine by authoring immersive visual stories, or titles, developing imaginative new characters and inspiring fandoms. Our creator base ranges from the individual enthusiast with a love of storytelling to the professional author building a brand and an enterprise on our platform. WEBTOON provides creators with an opportunity to monetize their creativity through various means, including Paid Content, Advertising and IP Adaptations. Our platform serves both amateur and professional creators. Professional creators are defined as creators who monetize through Paid Content on our platform under formal creator agreements with Paid Content revenue sharing provisions. We consider these two groups of creators separately because their intentions are often distinct. Amateur creators, which make up the vast majority of the 24 million creators on our platform, may come to our platform simply for the love of our unique form of storytelling and to connect with an engaged and like-minded audience. On the contrary, professional creators are often building a brand and an enterprise on our platform. In the year ended December 31, 2023, the average earnings per professional creator on our platform were $48 thousand, with top 100 creators earning an average of $1 million, and, cumulatively, our creators earned over $2.8 billion between 2017 and 2023. Due to the deep and continuous user engagement fostered through our serialized format, content on our platform has greater longevity. Some of the most successful series on our platform continue to attract new users after more than 10 years. Users come to our platform to discover and consume engaging and immersive content. Our creators tell stories that are relatable to global audiences, attracting users across age groups, geographies and genders. In fact, according to our April 2024 survey we conducted of our U.S. users, 97% agreed that WEBTOON is entertaining and fun, achieving a higher score than other platforms including Roblox, Netflix and TikTok. The web-comic format has grown in popularity globally, with particular affinity among Gen Z audiences. As of March 31, 2024, our user base was highly global across over 150 countries with over half of our monthly active users coming from outside of our core markets of Korea, Japan and the U.S. and Canada (“North America”). Our largest proportion of users are Gen Z (under 24 years old) and millennials (25 to 34 years old), who are mobile-first, highly engaged users with increasing purchasing power. Community reinforces the benefits to creators and users on our platform. We help users and creators build relationships and engage with one another over content. As users, or “fans,” often develop a personal connection to the titles on our platform, they relish the direct engagement with creators through both our comments section at the end of each episode and the “Creator Profile” section, where creators can post messages and users can respond directly. Fans also appreciate the ability to potentially influence how stories unfold and how their favorite characters evolve, as creators may choose to incorporate fans’ feedback. This enables a positive feedback loop for content creation and user engagement. This community engagement powers a flywheel of user engagement and creator readership, which in turn drives WEBTOON’s success. This vibrant ecosystem is amplified by our foundational technology and artificial intelligence capabilities, which enable content creation, along with our content discovery and recommendation engines. Our content creation technology helps creators enhance their storytelling skills, tailor the content to various global audiences and build more engaged, wider fan bases around the world. For users, our technology enables a personalized recommendation model and rule-based curation methodology to encourage new content discovery. These tools are highly scalable across markets and our newer markets are able to benefit from the content and platform infrastructure we have invested in and refined in Korea and Japan. Our business model is driven by the shared success of all those who participate in our platform. The result is earnings for creators, diversity of content for users to enjoy, high-intent and relevant audiences for advertising partners and a multitude of intellectual property to be adapted by media partners. Greater engagement leads to higher revenue growth and stronger user economics, which in turn provides us the benefit of diversified revenue streams and allows for reinvestment into the creators on our platform. (1) The number of creators is as of December 31, 2023. The number of monthly active users and countries are as of the quarter ended March 31, 2024 and as of March 31, 2024, respectively. WEBTOON is a Delaware corporation and was incorporated in 2016. Our principal executive offices are located at 5700 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 220, Los Angeles, CA.
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