A Closer Look at Webtoons in Japan
I want to talk about this.
This is Japanese manga editor Kentaro Ogino who goes by gouranga on Twitter. According to Fandom.com, he’s working on Sword Art Online - Progressive, Ninja Slayer, and a handful of other mangas I’ve heard of as well as many I haven’t.
There are a lot of comments. Mostly in support of gouranga with many opining the “sameness” of webtoons while others talk about the difficulties reading vertical mangas.
So, let’s talk about it.
How Does the Japanese Webtoon Market Look?
There are multiple webtoon platforms operating in the Japanese market, but really only one whose data specifically singles out their revenue by region: WEBTOON.
Based on WEBTOON’s 2025 quarterly financials, we can easily put together their revenue for Japan: 621.541 million USD for the year of 2025.
My biggest red flag with WEBTOON’s Q1 2026 Financial report was the shrink in Japan revenue. Considering that Japan represents the single largest market for WEBTOON content internationally (even compared to Korea), this should start sounding alarm bells all over.
And while I’d love to estimate Piccoma’s revenue in Japan (aka Kakao Piccoma), there’s no data that singles out webtoons or even Japan. The only figure for Japan I could find was 105 billion JPY (approx. 672 million USD) for 2024 from an interview with the Korean Joongang Daily (link).
What about Lezhin, Comico, or Toomics, you ask? Zip.
Now for Manga in 2025
I’m basically summarizing this post by Richard Handjaja who also runs Animenomics here on Substack. If you want more information or… you know, more information on the manga and anime industries, check out Animenomics.
Manga had a semi-disappointing year in their homecourt with 693 billion JPY (4.45 billion USD) in total manga sales representing a 2% reduction year-on-year. Worse still, it broke an 8-year streak during which manga sales in Japan were increasing year-on-year.
Digital manga has grown at an annual rate of 4.6% and, if previous year’s trends hold, digital sales will have accounted for nearly three-quarters of manga sales within Japan (73% in 2024 according to ICv2).
The prevailing sentiment is that the Japanese market is going through a shrink. Whether it’s a sign of a longer pattern or just a blip on the radar is yet to be seen.
(Start) Putting It Together
Based on the figure for 2024, we can estimate digital manga sales in Japan. I’m calling it at 3.337 billion USD for 2025 assuming 75% of total sales were digital (I’m assuming a 2% increase).
That would put Line Manga’s revenue in Japan at 18.6% of the entire digital manga market for 2025.
Holy shit that’s a lot.
The competition between Piccoma and Line Manga has been fierce over the past few years, but the prevailing sentiment is that Line Manga (WEBTOON) has pulled ahead and Kakao has yet to close the distance. And with Toomics’ current financial troubles and Comico’s massive international hurdles, it’s unlikely they’ve made much headway.
Without any solid numbers though, I can’t estimate anything for Piccoma, Toomics, Comico or Lezhin’s operations in Japan. But my guess is that combined they could at least match Line Manga.
There are massive caveats to be had.
Many of Japan’s most popular webtoons are Korean. But we’re way past the days when Korean webtoons populated the entirety of the top 20 lists in Japan, but Korean titles still rake in massive amounts of revenue across the board.
And webtoon platforms are still home to digital manga in the page view formats as well as titles that have been adjusted to scroll view (although my understanding is those are hit-and-miss).
So even if webtoon platforms account for a third or more of the digital manga market in Japan, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the revenue is directly related to webtoon content.
Confused? Well, too bad. We’re going deeper.
What Does It All Mean?
I hate to keep calling on WEBTOON, but… that’s what you get for sitting in the front of the class.
