Introduction
One of the rapidly growing media fields in twenty-first-century Korea is webcomics. The webtoon (wept'un)—a term coined in Korea to refer to webcomics—is arguably the most pervasive and powerful form of digital serial production in Korea today. In 2014, more than 6.2 million people per day (over 12 percent of the South Korean population) visited and read comics on the Naver Webtoon platform, which runs the biggest webcomics service in Korea (Naver Webtoon 2014). A 2016 survey conducted by a Korean newspaper showed that being a webtoon artist is one of the most popular future careers among Korean elementary school students (Mun Ilyo Reference Mun2016). Many webtoon artists (e.g., Kian 84, Yun T'aeho, Chu Homin, Pak T'aejun, Kim P'ung, etc.) are recognized as celebrities and appear on talk shows, reality shows, and cooking shows.
The remarkable increase in the popularity of webtoons in Korea is due in part to the successful adaptation of comics styles to the digital environment, which features a vertical layout optimized for computer and smartphone screens, experimentation with color and space (pages, panels, and gutters), and media convergence within webtoons that ranges from music, 3D effects, and animation functions to the more recent technologies of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). There is no doubt that webcomics in Korea have become a powerful artistic form incorporating available digital technologies.
However, the most significant factor that has made the webtoon a distinctive medium of digital art is, I argue, the novel system of its production, distribution, consumption, and participation—namely, the digital webtoon platforms that have brought fundamental changes to comics culture in the twenty-first century. Webtoons have developed by utilizing various potentials that the digital platform offers, such as open solicitation, (partially) free web/mobile distribution, active communication between readers and producers through comment and recommendation systems, profit from advertisement and page viewing, transmedia production, and the incorporation of multiple media capabilities. As a new cultural medium, the webtoon is thus inseparable from its platforms, and it is organically tied to its distinctive platform ecology, which is different from the ecosystems that other (global) mega-platforms have created.
Various social, economic, political, educational, and cultural sectors have become exponentially dependent on platforms, to the extent that it is not an exaggeration to call the environment in which we live a “platform society” (Van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal Reference Van Dijck, Poell and de Waal2018). A platform society has distinctive features that blur the boundaries between public and private, business and leisure, producer and user, and creator and audience. As digital intermediaries, platforms have not only changed the general landscape and structure of social sectors but also altered art production, distribution, and consumption. An obvious example is the music platform industry. Unlike CDs, which used existing industry infrastructure, the digital music files on computers—such as MP3, AAC, and WAV audio files—brought changes to the music format and reconfigured the music industry's models. Based on music as a digital commodity, media streaming platforms such as Spotify have fundamentally changed the whole system in which music is produced, distributed, and consumed, thereby actively shaping the music culture in general (Morris Reference Morris2015, Reference Morris and Click2018).
Whereas mega-platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google have been the central topics of platform studies, there has been little research to date on the production of graphic narratives, web novels, illustrations, and other types of art that are heavily dependent on platforms in the twenty-first century. In particular, the digital platform's intervention in art production and its broader ecology have received much less attention than general user-generated content, such as that seen on YouTube. This article provides a critical analysis of this newly emerging media ecology by examining the relationship between digital graphic narrative culture and the platforms it inhabits. The platform culture of webcomics is not yet a cultural phenomenon in the United States or in France and other European countries that have historically had a strong comics culture. Even Japan, the largest global comics market, did not pay attention to webcomics (produced digitally, and thus different from scanned paper comics) and their platform services until the mid-2010s. By the end of that decade, however, webcomics platforms had become a central phenomenon in Asian cultures, including Japan and, in particular, Indonesia among Southeast Asian countries.Footnote 1 Webcomics platforms are now expanding into the United States and Europe, as seen in the cases of Tapas, which is based in the United States, and Delitoon in France. Started and developed in Korea, webtoon platforms have not only shaped their own distinctive business models but also constructed the way in which the new medium of webcomics is produced, distributed, and consumed. More significantly, the impact of these platforms goes beyond the realm of webtoons to affect the general media ecology of other art forms, such as web novels, illustrations, paintings, and sound.
Engaging with the insights from recent studies on platforms and utilizing empirical media analysis, this article addresses such questions as how the webtoon media platforms function; how both the webtoon as an art form and its media ecology in general are shaped by these platforms; and how webtoons’ relationships with these platforms affect other art forms. I argue that it is not only the webtoon's aesthetic innovations but also its platforms—and the specific media ecology that those platforms create—that have made the webtoon a mainstream popular culture form that continues to thrive in Korea, where comics have never been as influential as in Japan and the United States. However, I also argue that the Korean webtoon platforms demonstrate the continuing and intensifying dependence of culture on platforms—a process that I call “the platformization of culture”—and that this specific type of platformization is reinforced by what I call “the artist incubating system,” through which platforms promote amateur artists’ constant and active participation.Footnote 2 In relation to the artist incubating system, I discuss the broad networks involving the government, public organizations, conglomerates, and educational institutions that directly and indirectly assist the acceleration of the platformization of culture. I specifically focus on Naver Webtoon, the biggest and most influential webtoon platform, but discuss its partners and other similar webtoon platforms as well for richer analysis.
Webtoon Platforms
The term “platform” has been a complicated signifier ever since digital culture first emerged. In this section, I explain the place and features of platforms in contemporary society and characterize the platforms of the webtoon to further contextualize my discussion of the platformization of the webtoon in the next section. Tarleton Gillespie was one of the first scholars to tease out the multilayered meanings that the term “platform” encompasses. Using the Oxford English Dictionary's etymology of the word, Gillespie explains its layers of meaning by stressing four semantic categories: “computational,” “architectural,” “figurative,” and “political” (Gillespie Reference Gillespie2010, 349–50). By analyzing the multiple meanings of the word “platform,” Gillespie emphasizes the problems that arose when the term was adopted to refer to online content-hosting services such as YouTube. Given the figurative/metaphorical and political/ideological meanings of “platform,” the term not only indicates a functional/physical aspect but also “suggests a progressive and egalitarian arrangement, promising to support those who stand upon it” (350). Gillespie's analysis warns us to be aware of the implicit claim that a “platform” offers “technical neutrality and progressive openness” (360).
Another significant platform studies scholar, José van Dijck, sees a platform as a “mediator”—a term she borrows from actor-network theory—rather than as an intermediary, in the sense that “it shapes the performance of social acts instead of merely facilitating them” (Van Dijck Reference Van Dijck2013, 29). According to Van Dijck's technical definition of platforms, they are “the providers of software, (sometimes) hardware, and services that help code social activities into a computational architecture; they process (meta)data through algorithms and formatted protocols before presenting their interpreted logic in the form of user-friendly interfaces with default settings that reflect the platform owner's strategic choices” (29). Both Gillespie and Van Dijck emphasize the significant interpenetration of platforms and society, but Van Dijck focuses more on platforms’ constitutive role, while Gillespie stresses the platform's metaphoric misrepresentation. Van Dijck's definition of platform as mediator is useful to highlight the powerful intervention of platforms in culture and society in general.
The Korean webtoon platform system, which initially seemed to be a simple content provider, is not a mere delivery service, database, or facilitator, but, I argue, a system that quickly became a quintessential infrastructure that shapes and governs the entire webtoon culture. Webtoon platforms affect the way webtoons are produced, circulated, and consumed in a fundamental way through systems such as the freemium business model, various profit-generating methods, standardized serial publication, regulated user comment and recommendation systems, webtoon mobile apps/viewers, webtoon editors’ (called webtoon PDs in Korea) participation in webtoon production, and league systems for amateur artists.
The term “platform” is thus a blurred and broad signifier, and the various platform types cover a wide range of digital operations. Having reviewed recent attempts to define and categorize the term “platform,” Marc Steinberg and Jinying Li offer their own brief and practical tripartite typology of platforms. The three types are (1) “product-technology type platforms,” which “designate something like a computing infrastructure, the hardware basis for computational activities”; (2) “content platforms, or platforms for content,” which “are websites or app variants of what is called social media”; and (3) “transaction-type and mediation-type platforms,” which designate “something akin to the mediation-structure or intermediary that makes certain kinds of transaction possible” (Steinberg and Li Reference Steinberg and Li2017, 175–76).Footnote 3 However, as Steinberg and Li also mention, this typology is not definitive, because quite a few individual platforms include features of different types of platforms. The webtoon platforms may belong to the second type of platform in this typology—namely, content platforms—but they also feature some aspects of transaction-type and mediation-type platforms because they function as a provider of advertising services and act as a mediator in monetary transactions between artists, users, advertisers, and other transmedia production parties. The categorization becomes more complex when we consider how webtoon platforms such as Naver Webtoon and Daum Webtoon are also part of larger and more complicated parent platforms and networks, which include search engines, community sites, online transaction sites, content providers (of news, webtoons, web novels, movies, music, etc.), messaging and communication, maps, transportation, and so forth.Footnote 4
The Platformization of Culture
The thriving culture of Korean comics is particularly fascinating and noteworthy because Korean comics never enjoyed such intense popularity and prosperity before the era of the webtoon in the twenty-first century. The webtoon is significant not just because of its unprecedented popularity but also because of the diverse and authentic content and styles developed by new comics artists. This exceptional boom in comics is a revolutionary event in the history of Korean comics, and webtoon platforms have been given credit for that. It is quite obvious that webtoon culture would not have gone viral so quickly without the operations of the webtoon platform. However, webtoon production's continuing and intensifying dependence on platforms engenders other issues that need to be critically addressed—issues encompassed by what I call “the platformization of culture.”
The digital production of Korean comics is so prevalent and popular that, according to a survey of the comics business conducted in 2017, viewers of digital comics made up 73.6 percent of comics readers, while viewers of print comics accounted for only 26.4 percent.Footnote 5 Considering that most digital comics are in fact webtoons, it is not difficult to imagine how influential the webtoon platforms are in shaping Korean comics culture in general. Webtoon platforms do not neutrally publish and deliver webtoons to the reader, but rather they construct and steer the ways in which webtoons are created, circulated, and consumed. They also mold and constantly change the relations among the artists, advertisers, users/viewers/readers, and other transmedia production parties, as well as the ways in which those relations are managed. In short, the platforms play a central role in constituting the webtoon as an art form and in establishing the ecology surrounding it—while simultaneously operating in ways that maximize the commodity value of the cultural content.
The web in general, various societal sectors, and other forms of cultural production (such as news, digital games, and music) have all been dependent on platform operations since the mid- to late 2000s, in particular with the rise of social media (Helmond Reference Helmond2015; Morris Reference Morris2015, Reference Morris and Click2018; Nieborg and Poell Reference Nieborg and Poell2018, Reference Nieborg, Poell, Deuze, Deuze and Prenger2019; Steinberg Reference Steinberg2019; Van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal Reference Van Dijck, Poell and de Waal2018). Each discussion of platformization of the web, society, music fandom, news and games, and chat apps develops a specific focus based on the objects and phenomena that it examines, and thus each discussion varies in emphasis when defining what platformization means. Focusing on Facebook in her explanation of the platformization of the web, Anne Helmond sees the offer of APIs (application programing interfaces) as the core feature of the shift from “social network sites” to “social media platforms,” and she defines “platformization” as a term that refers to “the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and the consequences of the expansion of social media platforms into other spaces online” (Helmond Reference Helmond2015, 5).Footnote 6 If Helmond's “platformization” explains how the social media platforms and the web affect each other through the process of data production and collection, then José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martjin de Waal (Reference Van Dijck, Poell and de Waal2018) use the term “platform society” to explain the ways in which platforms penetrate and converge with our social infrastructure and practices in news, urban transport, healthcare, and education. Platformization in this case shows how inseparable platforms and the societal structure are and how fundamentally they transform each other. The significant impact that platforms have on cultural production is a more recent development. In a 2019 article, David Nieborg and Thomas Poell explain how news and digital games are essentially “contingent” on platforms. The approaches to platformization are diverse partly because “platform,” both as a term and a practice, is truly vague and broad, as explained earlier. However, what these discussions share is their emphasis on internet, society, and cultural sectors’ increasing dependence on platforms and their inextricable relationships with each other.
Taking cues from these discussions, in particular from Nieborg and Poell's, I define the term “platformization of culture” as the process by which cultural production, distribution, circulation, consumption, and further creative use (including transmedia production and fan art) become fundamentally dependent on digital platforms, to the extent that the ecosystem that the art and entertainment belong to is shaped, mediated, and sustained by platforms’ infrastructural, economic, and administrative operations. By defining the term in this way, I attempt to shift the focus away from the platform itself as digital power and toward the transformation of media ecology—and to stress not only production and distribution but also viewers’ consumption and participation as well as further transmedia productions, which are a crucial part of webtoon culture and other contemporary cultural fields.
Platform Dependency
The webtoon as a specific art form developed by adapting a certain digital environment of cultural production. As I have explained elsewhere, the vertical layout for scrolling down offers webtoons a theoretically infinitely long page on which artists can express a different sensibility of time and space than that found on the conventional printed page, while optimizing the new sensibility for computer and smartphone screen viewing (Cho Reference Cho2016). The freedom that vertical scrolling gives in terms of space and layout has enabled artists to experiment with specific spaces that are distinct for comics: the page, panel, gutters, and speech balloons/captions. Digital production has also allowed artists to utilize broad ranges of color at no cost. In addition, webtoons have gradually developed experiments through media convergence combining sound effects, 3D visual effects, the insertion of short video clips, diverse animation effects, and, recently, AR and VR. In terms of transmedia production, webtoons have been popularly adapted to and remade as TV dramas, films, web dramas and movies, theater plays, novels, and digital games—and popular webtoons are even being republished in print form. Moreover, the webtoon has become a popular medium that Korean companies and organizations often adopt to promote their brand value. Therefore, webtoons have arguably become one of the richest resources for transmedia production in contemporary Korea.
Overall, this growth of the webtoon as a cultural phenomenon and business is highly contingent on platforms, in particular a few powerful webtoon platforms such as Naver Webtoon, Daum Webtoon, and Lezhin Comics. The webtoon became a part of webtoon platforms almost as soon as the specific digital comics art form started to be popularized, and it has developed within platform environments ever since then. Webtoons are not as dependent on platforms as digital games as a type of software, which are reliant on platforms from their inception (Nieborg and Poell Reference Nieborg, Poell, Deuze, Deuze and Prenger2019, 86), but the whole system developed by the webtoon platforms that currently house most webtoon art works has already made the webtoon inseparable from its platforms. Before Daum and Naver started webtoon services, in 2003 and 2004, respectively, the publication of webtoons was not centralized by webtoon platforms, compared with webtoons’ current heavy reliance on the physical inhabitation of platforms. Comics artists used to publish their artwork on their personal websites and/or on diverse community websites. However, it has now become quite difficult for webtoon artists to be recognized if they do not publish their work through one of the webtoon platforms, unless they are already well-established artists.Footnote 7 Also, even if their webtoon art draws attention from a significant number of personal/community website viewers, frequent page views do not readily translate into monetary rewards. Webtoon platforms, by contrast, have found ways to reliably monetize successful serials. The concentration of webtoon artists on webtoon platforms due to the reciprocal needs of both artists and platforms persistently increases the platforms’ prominence within the media ecology of the webtoon.
The economic model of webtoons was extremely precarious until the early 2010s, when the webtoon market finally changed from a completely free service to a freemium service. Naver Webtoon and Daum Webtoon—the first platforms that started collecting and publishing webtoons—initially promoted webtoons as free content to their users to increase visitor traffic, and this continued for about a decade.Footnote 8 This practice planted in consumers’ minds the perception that webtoon art is a free commodity, resulting in significant disruption and antagonism when platforms started charging for their webtoon services. The marketing of webtoons as a free cultural commodity also highlights the platforms’ exploitation of the cultural labor of both professional and amateur artists,Footnote 9 even though platforms such as Naver do pay professional artists per installment.
Despite the obvious problems with the free content model, it did have some positive aspects. For instance, the free service is generally credited with making the mid-2000s webtoon boom possible by lowering the barriers to access and by continuously attracting new users to webtoon culture.Footnote 10 As a business model, webtoon platforms can be defined as a multisided market because they facilitate interactions between different groups of participants, connecting webtoon artists, viewers/readers, advertisers, and other media production companies.Footnote 11 To be successful, platforms as multisided markets have to link as many users to their various sides as they can (Van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal Reference Van Dijck, Poell and de Waal2018, 38). The initial influx of webtoon viewers and platform users as a result of the free-of-charge service, therefore, helped webtoon platforms establish the webtoon ecology we have today, in which most transmedia productions take place.
One of the most fundamental changes that platforms brought to the webtoon ecosystem in the 2010s was the application of monetization methods to transform webtoons into (partially) paid content. Platforms have constantly sought new ways to maximize the monetization of webtoons as a commodity, which profoundly affects all participating parties. The essential business model of webtoon platforms is the freemium. The freemium business model operates differently in the webtoon market than in the game industry. In game companies, a basic version of a game with limited functionality is provided for free, but players must pay for an upgraded or fuller version with additional features.
In contrast, webtoon platforms’ freemium service is quite complicated. Whereas webtoon platforms that started as paid-content service providers, such as Lezhin Comics, have a standard freemium service (in which a prologue and the first few episodes are free of charge and a premium is charged for the rest of the installments), other webtoon platforms, such Naver Webtoon and Daum Webtoon, instead charge according to the popularity and status of a webtoon's serialization. In Naver and Daum, ongoing serializations are still offered free, but platforms also display a list of a few unpublished future installments of each story (along with the published ones), and viewers must pay for these episodes if they want to read them before they are officially published. This paid “Pre-view” system (miribogi) was one of the earliest successful monetization methods for webtoon content. The serialized webtoons eventually change to paid content once the serialization is complete, although Naver Webtoon does continue to offer some completed webtoons (usually the less popular ones) for free.
Following the approach of KakaoPage, Naver Webtoon has also started a new monetization practice for paid content that combines free offers and premium service. In this system, once viewers sign into the website, the platform offers an individually tailored coupon with which they can access the next episode of the story they are currently reading for free—provided they wait for a period of time (usually 12 hours to three days) to use the coupon. All episodes of the story will therefore be available free to the viewer who waits, but it turns out that viewers are not usually patient enough to do so. KakaoPage's “Free of Charge If You Wait” (Kidarimyŏn muryo) business model became extremely successful and their profits increased a hundredfold in just a few years, from $1.87 million (2.1 billion won) in 2013 to approximately $196 million (about 220 billion won) in 2018 (Im Hyŏnu Reference Im2018). Both the “Pre-view” and the “Free of Charge If You Wait” systems are excellent examples of ways to monetize the serial form, whose inbuilt cliffhangers drive viewers to continuously consume narratively linked cultural commodities once they engage with them.
In addition to the monetization of webtoon content, platforms constantly seek new ways of publishing advertisements, which have been their main revenue source since the inception of webtoon service. The most common methods include in-text advertisement, which is usually situated at the end of each installment; banners (images and videos) in multiple sizes and locations (both for mobile and web viewing); product placement, which includes brand-related text, images, video, and entire branded webtoons; and so-called reward advertisement, which requires viewers’ action (such as registration or click through) and rewards them with a coupon of some kind.Footnote 12 Webtoons also play a central role in the business of transmedia productions. They are re-created as various types of media products, such as films, TV dramas, theater productions, web dramas, films, web novels, and so on.Footnote 13 In tandem with advertising and transmedia production, the character business is another significant part of monetization, especially for some character-centered episodic webtoons such as Campus Diary (Taehak ilgi).
As a way to allocate income from advertising, Naver Webtoon started a profit distribution system called “Page Profit Share” (PPS) in 2013, about a decade after it started the webtoon service in 2004 (Han Ch'angwan Reference Ch'angwan2016, 131). Through the PPS system, Naver connects artists with advertisers; the advertisers then pay the artists directly for their branded webtoons and product placement, while the platform receives publishing fees from the advertisers. As we can see in these cases, it is recognized that artists’ working conditions—and platforms’ treatment of webtoon artists—are improving, especially compared with the situation a decade ago, and the financial resources available to artists have diversified. However, almost all these changes have been made unidirectionally by the web platforms, without any explanation to artists or to the management companies or agencies that manage groups of artists. Except for a small number of well-established webtoon artists, most artists find they have little choice but to accept the platforms’ constantly changing regulations, monetization systems, and even unfair contracts, while also fashioning their artwork to work with those operations.Footnote 14
Even the webtoon's specific art form, which does not necessarily seem to have developed under the influence of platforms, is profoundly affected by platform operations. For example, when ComicoFootnote 15 solicited potential webtoon artists through its amateur artist competition sites in the early years of its service, it required artists to submit their artwork following specific format requirements, such as being in color, longer than fifteen frames, and having a vertical layout for scrolling (Cho Reference Cho2016). Platforms did not create the digital form of comics art, but they did actively promote certain key features of the webtoon that they considered preferable (possibly because it was considered optimal for commodification of the webtoon art) and eventually contributed to standardizing them.
Another example of platforms’ influence on the webtoon form pertains to specific serialization practices of webtoon publication. Currently, in webtoon production for Korean platforms, about sixty to eighty panels have become the standard length for each installment. This is quite short compared with traditional print comics published in comic magazines but much longer than digital comic strips. Once a certain formal feature is standardized, the adjustment is reinforced by viewers. For instance, in the comments section located below each webtoon installment, viewers often complain if an installment is shorter than sixty panels, so webtoon platforms try to have the artist meet the standardized length. On the one hand, it is not uncommon for an artist to post a note of apology if an installment does not meet the expected number of panels.Footnote 16 On the other hand, it is not unusual for readers to count the number of panels and express their appreciation for an unusually long installment, thus demonstrating that readers are, consciously or unconsciously, keenly aware of the length that has been standardized by the platforms.Footnote 17 Moreover, the number of panels per installment is not merely a matter of physical length but affects plot progression, character formation, scene composition, and the interpretation of the whole narrative. A webtoon artist may therefore have to substantially alter the narrative development of a webtoon to accommodate both platform requirements and reader expectations.
In tandem with setting the length of a webtoon installment, platforms such as Naver and Daum strictly regulate the publication schedule; today, almost all webtoons are serialized on a designated day once a week (it used to be twice a week);Footnote 18 as a result, a webtoon is often called a “Monday webtoon,” “Tuesday webtoon,” and so forth. This shapes viewers’ reading habits and creates artists’ extremely rigid work schedules. Although Lezhin has a slightly more flexible schedule than Naver and Daum, it is not significantly different (Lezhin includes a couple of other options, such as publishing an installment every ten days). Webtoon artists usually have a hard time meeting the weekly deadline of sixty to eighty panels for each installment, which may be having the unintended effect of leading to stagnation and lack of innovation. In this, as in all other respects, I argue, webtoon art production is heavily contingent on platforms in two interconnected ways: it is not only malleable and variable, and hence easily affected by the changing operations of platforms, but also systematically standardized and inflexible.
The Artist Incubating System
Naver and Daum operate an open-publishing system for amateurs, which allows anyone who is interested in serializing their webtoons to do so in designated sections. The system has been successful, and Lezhin Comics adopted a similar method in August 2018. This system was created by webtoon platforms to promote amateur artists’ active participation, but it differs from fan art sites in that most amateur webtoon artists post with the aim of becoming professional artists, and their works are supposed to be authentic artwork (no parodies or reworkings of existing webtoons). Theoretically, these amateur artists all have an equal opportunity to be selected and promoted, becoming professional artists with a contract to officially serialize their works. This constant and regular promotion to the status of a professional artist with a contract also distinguishes webtoon platforms from common fan art sites. I call this practice the “artist incubating system” and argue that it is one of the webtoon platforms’ fundamental interventions into webtoon culture and that the process of the platformization of culture is effectively sustained and reinforced by this incubating system.
If the long-standing prize systems in cultural fields such as literature and film are the primary means for selecting future art stars through occasional competitions, then the artist incubating system generalizes this into an incessant everyday competition. Each of the three main webtoon platforms (Naver, Daum, and Lezhin) runs two different leagues. The lower-level competition is called “Challenge” (Tojŏn manhwa, 2-bu, and Ch'aelinji, in Naver, Daum, and Lezhin, respectively), and the upper-level competition is called “Best Challenge” (Pestŭ tojŏn, 1-bu, and Syup’ŏ ch'aelinji, respectively). The initial competition is open to everyone, and the advanced level is for amateur artists who are promoted from the lower level. A few artists from the Best Challenge advance to publish their webtoons under contract with the platform.
The three main criteria for selection that are posted on Naver's website are (1) number of published webtoon installments; (2) accumulated numbers of readers’ ratings, comments, clicks, site sharing, and clipping’ and (3) overall assessment by the platform's webtoon editors (Naver Customer Center 2019). The number of installments becomes a significant indicator that the amateur artist can continue producing a lengthy narrative for an extended time, while the second criterion helps the platform select a webtoon that will be profitable. The third criterion listed on Naver's website is extremely vague, but webtoon platform editors mainly try to find a balance between webtoon genres, artists’ genders, and artists’ age groups. If the current official serialization lacks a webtoon in the comedy genre, for instance, the platform tries to promote a comedy webtoon first, even though there may be webtoons of other genres that have higher reader rankings (Yi Kaon Reference Yi2012).
There is no specified formula for quantifying these variables, but it is very likely that a webtoon will be promoted if it goes viral, even if the editors’ assessment of it is quite low. As the first line of the webpage states, the initial qualification is the popularity that an amateur webtoon has gained while being serialized in the Challenge league. Another crucial element for both Challenge and Best Challenge competitors is whether they produce continuous serialization of a webtoon over a certain period of time. Continuous publication at regular intervals is considered a strong indicator of an artist's diligence and reliability. Because quite a few webtoons are uploaded each day, constant, regular, and frequent posting is the most effective way to attract viewers’ attention and have the webtoon be highly rated and favorably commented on. From the webtoon editors’ perspective, it is important to know before signing a contract whether an amateur artist can continue to serialize work without fail over an extended period of time—because this is how professional artists’ webtoons are published.Footnote 19
This double-league competition system is currently well established as the main path to a professional debut, and many well-known webtoon artists have emerged through it, including Pak T'aejun (Oemo chisang chuŭi, or Lookism), Cho Sŏk (Maŭm ŭi sori, or The Sound of Mind), Chi Kangmin (Wara! P'yŏnŭijŏm, or Come to the Convenience Store!), and Son Cheho and Yi Kwangsu (Nobŭlesŭ, or Noblesse). In July 2017, about 12,000 webtoons were available on the Challenge league, and 2,212 webtoons were published in the Best Challenge league (18.72 percent of the total number of works in the Challenge league). A total of 137 of Best Challenge webtoons (6.19 percent of the 2,122) were promoted to official serialization. The portion of amateur artists surviving through both Challenge and Best Challenge is about 1.15 percent (Pak Kimuk Reference Pak2017). This very low success rate has been criticized, but in fact the league system significantly elevates the chances for an amateur artist's debut as a professional compared with the past, when opportunities were typically available only through apprenticeship or limited competitions.
At the same time, however, the artist incubating system intensifies art's dependence on platforms. First, numerous amateur artists voluntarily upload their works, constantly infusing the webtoon platforms with new content at no cost to the platforms; this free artwork enriches the platforms’ content significantly, at least in terms of volume, yet amateur artists receive no reward for their labor unless they are among the fortunate few who eventually sign a contract with the platform. Second, the artist incubating system molds and settles standardized forms of art, which, in turn, optimizes the platform business. The incubator system reinforces the specific artistic form as a dominant standard webtoon form. As a result, it does not leave much room for innovative experimentation and artistic diversity. Third, the incubating system perpetuates the webtoon ecosystem's dependence on platforms. Amateur artists who participate in the league competitions are more desperate to cooperate with platform regulations and expectations—in order to be selected and promoted—than established artists might be. Thus, the platforms’ efforts to promote specific art forms and production/consumption patterns can be highly effective when implemented through the artist incubating system.
Meanwhile, the artist incubating system is not sustained and reinforced by the platforms, amateur artists, and users alone because platformization is not merely about the dependency of cultural production on platforms and is not an isolated phenomenon at all. Platformization is connected to and affected by the operations of political, economic, sociocultural, and technological parties, and the networks they co-create in turn buttress and accelerate the platformization of culture. In the case of webtoons, the platformization is a complex process that involves the Korean government, public organizations, Korean conglomerates (chaebŏl), and educational institutions in addition to platforms, and it is directly or indirectly connected to the economic and social changes that neoliberal reforms have brought to Korean society since the 1990s. In particular, the Korean government's interventions in cultural industries and webtoon platform businesses have been mutually beneficial, as seen in the case of the government-sponsored training programs and competitions.
In relation to the artist incubating system, both government-sponsored training programs and art classes in colleges strengthen the influence of platforms on the production of webtoons by setting their programs’ final goal as having the students debut on webtoon platforms. One of the most significant government-sponsored training projects is the Creative Talent Partnership Program (Ch'angŭi injae tongban saŏp). Started in 2012, this program is funded annually by the Korea Creative Content Agency, or KOCCA (Han'guk k'ont’ench’ŭ chinhŭngwŏn), a division under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. The Creative Talent Partnership Program covers training programs in the field of comics, the character business, film, music, performance, storytelling, broadcasting, games, animation, and so on. About 250 of the 1,086 art projects created by the program's mentees between 2012 and 2014 won prizes or resulted in contracts with media companies and platforms (Han'guk k'ont’ench’ŭ chinhŭngwŏn chŏngch'aek ponbu 2016, 168). In the field of webtoons, 62 mentors and 162 mentees participated in the program between 2012 and 2016. The webtoon artist training program was nine months long, and the goal was to have mentees debut on a webtoon platform. As a result, 61 mentees out of 80 who participated in the program between 2013 and 2015 debuted on a webtoon platform (Kang Ŭnwŏn and Yi Sŭngjin Reference Kang and Sŭngjin2017, 141–42). Educational institutes and agencies have also participated in these government-initiated programs as hosts that are in charge of specific trainings and curricula; in the case of webtoon, KOCCA worked with such universities as Sejong University, Sangmyŏng University, and Tongguk University (Han'guk k'ont’ench’ŭ chinhŭngwŏn chŏngch'aek ponbu 2016, 168).
With the government's support, comics-related associations and quasi-governmental organizations also offer events and programs. For example, KOCCA funds the Korea Cartoonists Association (Han'guk manhwaga hyŏphoe), which was established in 1968 and is now the oldest and largest organization of comics artists in Korea. In terms of training new artists, the Korean Cartoonists Association founded the Webtoon Academy (Wept'un akademi) in 2013 to “provide future professionals appropriate training” and “introduce them to webtoon platforms” for their future debuts and continuing art production (Han'guk k'ont’ench’ŭ chinhŭngwŏn chŏngch'aek ponbu 2016, 359). Among quasi-governmental organizations, the Korea Manhwa Contents Agency, or KOMACON (Han'guk manhwa yŏngsang chinhŭngwŏn), founded by the city of Puch’ŏn and also funded by the Korean government through KOCCA, actively runs a digital comics academy for future professionals, which offers forty-eight courses and has 1,300 enrolled participants. Here again, it is significant that this academy emphasizes the relations between its programs and the webtoon platform contests (Han'guk k'ont’ench’ŭ chinhŭngwŏn chŏngch'aek ponbu 2018, 358). All these government-sponsored professional training programs aim to promote and enrich comics culture and to cultivate future professional artists, but the substantial outcome is to bolster the status of the webtoon platforms in the media ecology by aligning the training programs with the platforms’ artist incubating systems.
The close partnerships among the government, public organizations, corporations, and platforms are also obvious in the case of the webtoon contests organized by the government, and the whole process of these competitions affects the media ecology by benefitting the most powerful webtoon platforms. The webtoon industry is already highly concentrated and oligopolistic: three-quarters of viewers of digital comics access webtoons using the Naver Webtoon platform, followed by Daum and Lezhin.Footnote 20 However, the Korean government is not necessarily against the oligopolization of this cultural sector, even though it funds new developments of diverse webtoon platforms and related businesses; rather, the involvement of the Korean government and other public organizations in promoting webtoons through government-initiated competitions serves to increase the oligopolization of the webtoon business. For instance, the government-sponsored KOMACON organizes comics contests with the two most influential webtoon platforms, Daum and Naver, namely, the “Daum Digital Comics Contest” (Daum onlain manhwa kongmo taejŏn) and “Best College Comics Contest” (Naver taehak manhwa ch'oegangja-jŏn). What is interesting about these contests is their co-organizers and the prizes they offer. The Daum Digital Comics Contest is co-organized by KOMACON with CJ Entertainment & Media, which is a part of the CJ Group, a Korean conglomerate (Han'guk k'ont’ench’ŭ chinhŭngwŏn chŏngch'aek ponbu 2018, 382). This is a typical example of cooperation between the government and a conglomerate in their promotion of specific cultural industries. In the 2010s, when webtoons began to be recognized as part of the country's highly profitable cultural industries, the Korean government and conglomerates expanded their interest in webtoons in addition to other cultural sectors, such as TV dramas, film, and K-pop, that were already well established in the global market.
The second significant comics contest that KOMACON organizes, the Best College Comics Contest, is co-sponsored by Naver Webtoon (Han'guk k'ont’ench’ŭ chinhŭngwŏn chŏngch'aek ponbu 2018, 382). Any college student, regardless of his or her major, can participate, and the awardees are given the opportunity to serialize their webtoons on the Naver platform, in addition to a monetary prize (Han'guk k'ont’ench’ŭ chinhŭngwŏn chŏngch'aek ponbu 2017, 109). These two contests are not simply competitions that give amateurs an opportunity to debut their work. More significantly, they are the result of overall cooperation among the government, a quasi-governmental organization, a conglomerate, and the most influential webtoon platforms—cooperation that systematically reinforces the artist incubating system, and thus the platformization of webtoons, while advocating the oligopoly of what are already the most influential webtoon platforms.
The Korean government's active intervention in the webtoon industry is not an exceptional case; rather, it can be understood as the webtoon industry being a part of the government's promotion of Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, and its global marketing of Korean cultural products. The Korean Wave, which is, in short, “the phenomenal success of Korean cultures in overseas market” (Choi Reference Choi, Lee and Nornes2015, 33), started with the popularity of Korean TV dramas and pop music overseas, and particularly in other Asian countries in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and then expanded into other cultural fields such as film, games, beauty, and food. In a broader context, Korean government's enthusiastic intervention in the promotion of Korean culture in the global market relates to its application of neoliberal logic to cultural industries in tandem with the neoliberal reform of its economy and society, a process that intensified after its financial crisis in 1997.Footnote 21 The Korean government under the Lee Myung-bak regime (2008–12), in particular, took a strong neoliberal approach to cultural industries and defined culture as “contents” (k'ont’ench’ŭ, a plural form in Korean), thus prioritizing the potential commodification and economic value of culture.Footnote 22 Indeed, the term “contents” replaced the term “culture” to a great extent in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The neoliberal approach to culture was further reinforced by the increased coalition of the government, conglomerates, financial institutions, and private investments for the purpose of expanding “contents” industries and markets (Ch'oe Yŏnghwa Reference Ch'oe2013, 256). Meanwhile, other minor cultural sectors experienced reverse discrimination because most governmental support was invested in Korean Wave–related cultural fields that were expected to yield higher economic value (Ch'oe Yŏnghwa 2011, 257).
Korean comics was not considered to be part of the Korean Wave until the second decade of the twenty-first century. It was recognized as a potential member of the Korean Wave after the significant increase of webtoon platforms and the changed perception of webtoon as paid content that took place in the mid-2010s (in particular after the founding of Lezhin Comics and a few other webtoon platforms in 2013). The 2017 Graphic Novel Industry White Paper, published by the KOCCA, demonstrates that by 2017, the government had specifically recognized webtoons as a cultural sector that “leads a new Korean Wave” (Han'guk k'ont’ench’ŭ chinhŭngwŏn chŏngch'aek ponbu 2018, 356). The Korean Wave as “a polycentric process of creative cultural participation” initiated and enriched by transnational users/fans is different from the aspect of the Korean Wave as “a national-institutional campaign” or “a policy initiative” (Choi Reference Choi, Lee and Nornes2015, 44). The government's recognition of webtoons as part of the Korean Wave was accompanied by more systematic government investment in terms of policies and economic assistance. The webtoon training programs and competitions thus need to be understood within this context of the neoliberal understanding of culture, underpinned by the coalition of the government and quasi-governmental organizations, conglomerates, financial sectors, and oligopolistic webtoon platforms. The platformization of culture, therefore, is aligned with neoliberal approaches to culture that prioritize the (potential) economic value of culture. Moreover, as we have seen, participating parties in this platformization process mutually reinforce each other's operations and accelerate the dependency of cultural production and artists (both amateur and professional) on platforms.
Since becoming well established, the artist incubating system for webtoon platforms has spread to other languages (English, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, etc.) and to other fields of art (predominantly web novels and arts such as illustrations, paintings, photography, sculpture, and sound). Some Korean webtoon platforms have started global services outside Korea that have created their own platforms, particularly in Japan (Comico, Line Manga, and Piccoma), while others are exporting their webtoons if the platform itself runs afoul of local government restrictions (such as in China). Tapas in the United States and Delitoon in France are platforms that are modeled after Korean webtoon platforms. In all cases, the platforms strongly promote the webtoon as a specific art form (mobile-friendly, vertical, colored, narrative-centered with a certain length, serialized) among local artists. Most of these platforms run an open-publishing system for amateur artists as well. For instance, Line Webtoon (a global version of Naver Webtoon established in 2014), which is available in Chinese, English, Indonesian, and Thai, has a section called “Canvas,” an open platform for amateurs who can later be promoted to the category of “Originals Creators,” who are “guaranteed monthly compensation as well as marketing, PR, and editorial support.”Footnote 23 Canvas does not operate a two-level competition system, but the basic idea is similar to that of the Korean webtoon platforms, and Line Webtoon regularly (once a month) selects the webtoons from Canvas that will officially be serialized.
The expansion of the artist incubating system to other fields has been encouraged by the great success of the webtoon platforms. The platforms now include web novels and apply the same monetization methods and artist incubating system to them. Naver runs exactly the same incubating system for web novels as it does for webtoons; the only difference is the name for each league (“Challenge League” and “Best League” for web novels, instead of “Challenge” and “Best Challenge” for webtoons). In an effort to promote types of artwork that have traditionally been less commercialized online than the webtoon and web novel, Naver launched a platform called Grafolio (a term combining words “grand” and “portfolio”) in 2014. Naver describes Grafolio as a “creative contents community” where artists can discover, share, and buy/sell their art works.Footnote 24
The way the Grafolio platform operates is slightly different from webtoon and web novel platforms, but it uses the same concept of incubating and promoting artists for future profit. Grafolio is actively involved in shaping the art scene through various platform functions—categorizing artwork according to its own key terms, promoting collaborations and certain works of art, seeking patrons for artists, and creating specific ways of publishing (for instance, serialized publishing of illustrations that connects them through the concept of storytelling). Grafolio does not have a league system, but it holds ongoing monthly competitions in various fields and selects a few amateur artists to promote, giving those artists a better chance to attract patrons’ support and have their works be adapted into other types of commercial products, which in turn are sold in Naver's own online market. It seems meaningful that the Grafolio platform provides a specialized way for artists to promote and sell their own art works much more effectively than if they tried to do so individually. However, as we have seen in the case of the platformization of webtoons, the digital platform's expansion into broader fields of art is a harbinger of more profound and aggressive interventions in art production and media ecology in the future.
Conclusion
Webtoon platforms play an increasingly crucial role in presenting, packaging/repackaging, and promoting works of art in certain ways while simultaneously creating and maintaining an environment that affects multisided participants, including artists, readers/viewers/users, other media producers and publishers, advertisers, and others. In tandem with shaping and reinforcing certain art forms and thus influencing the ways webtoon artists’ works are produced, digital platforms’ system of monetizing webtoon content (primarily, freemium service through weekly serialization) has significantly changed the way comics are perceived, consumed, and understood. Webtoon platforms also organize and influence viewers’ encounters with and understandings of artists’ work. While datafying viewers’ relationships with cultural content and with the artists who create that content, platforms utilize this datafied information to further monetize the platforms’ systems. This article, focusing on webtoon's case, has discussed the platformization of culture—namely, the phenomena that media ecology is molded by digital platforms, and that artwork's dependence on those platforms is both expanding and intensifying.
Functioning as a powerful intervention in media production, distribution, and consumption, webtoon platforms are a complex system that has telling aspects both for art products and for their creators and users. On the one hand, webtoon artists are empowered to utilize the platforms’ infrastructure to effectively promote themselves and connect with readers/viewers, and they can also benefit from the platforms’ monetization systems that maximize the commodity value of their artwork. Webtoon platforms lower the bar significantly for amateur artists, giving them many more opportunities to debut as professionals compared with the pre-platform era, when apprenticeship and limited competition systems were the main channels for amateur artists’ debuts. The platforms also empower viewers to actively promote artists whose works they appreciate, affect the platforms’ publishing decisions, and even help amateur artists debut as professionals. As we have seen, the business models and monetization methods that webtoon platforms have developed and incorporated improve artists’ financial situations and so help them continue to produce their works. Because most webtoons are concentrated on a few major platforms and their popularity and future profitability have been already tested by platform users, the platforms also provide producers and investors in other media industries with a convenient and effective way to find webtoons they would be interested in working with, which results in active transmedia productions based on webtoons.
On the other hand, platforms are exploitative and restrictive, even though the thriving comics culture (including increasing numbers of talented webtoon artists) and the dramatic growth of the webtoon business in Korea may obscure what has happened in the process of the platformization of culture. Both professional and amateur webtoon artists are supposed to follow the administrative and economic decisions of the platforms, which for the most part are decided unilaterally by the platforms. Although webtoon platforms cultivate amateur artists, they also benefit significantly from the free labor of numerous amateur artists who upload their artwork regularly in the hope of debuting on the platforms. The platforms therefore exploit amateur artists’ precarious status without providing appropriate compensation for their labor, despite amateur artists’ contributions to the webtoon repertoire and to the increase of user traffic on the platforms. Like other social media and content platforms, webtoon platforms also aggressively collect and utilize users’ profiles and behavioral data without full disclosure, in order to maximize their profits and further develop their monetization methods.
Even more noteworthy than the platforms’ enablement and exploitation, however, is the media phenomenon itself, and the question of how to assess this phenomenon. Today, both art forms and the ecology they belong to are tremendously affected by the platforms on which they appear, being shaped, mediated, and constantly revised by the platforms’ infrastructural, economic, and administrative operations. When we discuss webtoons and web novels, we cannot separate the content or the aesthetic form of the work from the platform where it is available because the webtoon and the web novel are not arbitrary digital forms; rather, they follow specific forms and systems co-created by platforms and have become increasingly dependent on the platform ecology. In other words, the webtoon is not merely a comic that is created for the web but a platformized art form that is optimized for the entire operation of a digital platform. The webtoon platforms, in turn, carefully strategize the key aspects of the art form to maximize the commodity value of webtoons, while simultaneously cultivating future artwork that will fit their regulations and reinforce their standardization through their artist incubating systems. Therefore, it may not be an exaggeration to say that the webtoon is instead a platform-toon (or platform comics), and that the web novel is instead a platform novel (or platform fiction).
The platformization of culture, which essentially prioritizes the potential monetary profit from art products, is not merely associated with neoliberal governance of and approach to culture, but instantiates them. Platforms’ neoliberal endeavor, as discussed earlier, is orchestrated and reinforced by various participating parties in economic, political, and sociocultural sectors through their coordinated operations, which, in turn, further accelerate the dependency of cultural production on platforms. This platform-centered media ecology is calibrated to maximize the economic value of cultural products and related activities, and thus the platformization of culture fundamentally leads to the further intensification of the commodification of culture in the digital age. The commodification of culture is an old phenomenon, but the case of webtoon platforms demonstrates how effectively and intensely art products can be hypercommodified in the platform-led media ecosystem.
Digital platform studies in relation to culture and society often draw attention—whether in a concerned or a celebratory way—to the features of platforms that blur boundaries between the private and public sectors (as in the cases of Airbnb, Uber, education platforms, etc.) or between producers and consumers (as in the cases of YouTube and participatory social media). However, one of the things that is blurred by, or buried under, the ambiguous and ambivalent functions of platforms is their exceptional contribution to the intensification of the commodification of culture, which is boosted by today's unprecedented dependency of arts on digital platforms. Although webtoon platforms are rapidly and continuously expanding to other fields of art as well as to other languages, we do not yet know whether the case of webtoon platforms is merely a transitional phenomenon or will turn out to be one of the most well-established and dominant models of digital cultural production in the near future. Despite this uncertainty, the platformization of culture examined through the case of webtoon platforms provides a crucial point of discussion vis-à-vis the fast-changing future deployment of the media ecosystem and its further impacts on global society.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.
