The web novel is evolving as a hidden card to save slumped domestic publication market. The reason is that the web novel is much shorter and in various genre than pure literature and is known as ‘Snack culture’ (quite enjoyable culture in short time). Main target of the web novel is teenagers to 20~30 years old young people so called digital generation. They mainly are attracted to the web novel.

According to the Korea Creative Content Agency, KT Management & Economy Research Institute on February 26, the domestic web novel market is growing at twice the rate every year. The size of the web novel market, which was only KRW 10 billion in 2013, increased to KRW 40 billion in 2015, and it was estimated to have grown to KRW 80 billion last year. With the growth of the web novel market, the domestic E-book market grew to KRW 150 billion last year. This is a remarkable growth compared to the total publication industry revenue, which showed a slight increase of 1.2% over the previous year. The domestic publication industry revenue has been declining every year from KRW 20.8 trillion in 2013 to KRW 20.3 trillion in 2015.

Web novels have grown rapidly as novel genres such as romance, martial arts, and sports became popular. A representative web novel site, ``Joara``, has reached a cumulative total of 13 billion views and 1.1 million members last year. It has started with a platform where anyone can post, and has been attracting readers with popular works such as ``Memorize`` and ``I am a noble``. According to the mobile app analyst Wise app, the ‘Joara’ mobile application has the longest average usage time of 1253 minutes per person per month among the Mobile Webtoon • Web novel application.

‘Kakaotalk``s mobile content platform- ‘KakaoPage’ serves more than 13,000 web novels. This is a number that includes e-books that digitize web novels and published novels. Recently, ‘KakaoPage’ have been published on the platform first and now have been publishing as paper book as web novels of ‘KakaoPage’ is becoming popular. One of the representative novels is a novelist Lee Wae Soo’s novel ‘Revenge agency corporation’.


The representative web novel of the ‘KakaoPage’- ‘I was born as the daughter of the king’ has surpassed one million subscribers and has also been made into a WebToon, which is gaining popularity in Korea and China. On the Naver platform, a web novel ‘Love in the moonlight’, produced last year as a drama series. The total number of cumulative hits exceeded 50 million. By the end of last year, there were 180,000 writers and more than 380,000 cumulative works in the Naver Web novel``s Challenge League (creative bulletin boards that anyone can freely participate in).


As Web novels become popular, publishers are launching a platform for free creative creation. The publishing company Wisdom House is going to launch an online site ``JustToon`` which is a series of web novels and WebToons and publisher Minumsa Co., Ltd is about to launch ‘BridG’ as their genre literature brand-gold branch.

A representative of Korea Creative Content Agency said that ‘The web novel market has started to grow rapidly from last year, and the age of users has also expanded’. A representative added that ‘The web novel market is going to be even bigger in the future as web novels are changing to paid service’.

By Jin Hyun Jin 2jinhj@


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