Daum Webtoon is Officially Dead

And with it, one of my favorite logos for a webtoon platform.

A small news item floated across my browser today. It’s one that most folks will skip past and while it isn’t likely to cause many ripples in the industry, it is a sign of just how far one of the biggest brands in Korea has fallen.

Daum, a web portal and search engine on par with Bing or Yahoo (yes, that comparison is purposeful), will be removing their link to Kakao Webtoon at the end of the month. In practical terms, the Kakao Webtoon platform will continue operating and this is just the removal of a link.

But there’s history here and this is just the latest in a long history that is the decomposition of Daum.

Small Company, Giant Footprint

Daum was founded in 1994 and the web portal was launched in 1997, pre-dating even Naver’s web portal. Over the course of the 2000’s, they developed a blog service, e-mail, messengers, online-shopping, news, and Potplayer, an actual competitor to RealPlayer and VLC in the early days.

In 2003, they launched one of the biggest advances of online content at the time, Daum Webtoon. Daum Webtoon was one of the earliest web portal platforms and home to OG creators like Kang Full (Love Story), Yoon Tae-ho (Misaeng), Chon Kye-young (Itaewon Class) and so many more.

Daum Webtoon was THE platform for compelling, character-driven webtoons during the early 2000’s before premium webtoons and Coins were a thing. Ask any early fans what their favorite Daum webtoon was and you’re likely to get a list in return.

Unfortunately, as the webtoon industry grew, Daum’s strategy struggled to keep up. Back in 2007, the Korea Times published an article talking about the “Republic of Naver”. By 2014, Naver’s lead was overwhelming with 76.69% of the Korean search-engine market being firmly in the control of Big Green (Yonhap News). Premium webtoon platforms like Lezhin offered competitive monetization for creators that the first generation of webtoon publishers just didn’t.

That same year, when it looked like Daum’s time in the spotlight was over, Daum made a decision that would cement their legacy and give them a chance to retake the markets they once dominated.

In 2014, Daum merged with Kakao to form Daum Kakao. It was a big move, one that dominated the news for a time. By this point, the success of KakaoTalk was undeniable with an estimated 37 million users in Korea out of a population of 50 million. At a time when the comparisons between Big Green and Google were starting to seem apt. Starting anew as Daum Kakao could be the push that the Daum branding needed to be at the forefront of the Korean tech industry again.

Except it wasn’t.

The new name didn’t last long with the shift back to Kakao Corp coming in 2015. While Daum’s legacy still lived on inside of the company, the branding was pushed aside in favor of a name that was synonymous with social messaging.

Meanwhile, KakaoPage had launched as a content platform in 2013, it was largely a failure. It housed videos, music, webtoons, and novels closer to what you’d expect from Amazon than a Korean content platform. But by 2014, they pivoted focus to webtoons and webnovels. This was a major success and a turning point as KakaoPage has become the home of multiple high profile webtoons including Solo Leveling, Mookhyang, and Villainesses Must Die.

All the while, Daum Webtoon was still active. However, without the same support that KakaoPage received, it languished. That is until Daum Webtoon relaunched… as Kakao Webtoon. With a diminishing marketshare and nearly no evidence of the brand’s existence outside of the search engine, Daum’s legacy was firmly placed in the dark.

That leads us to 2025.

Side note: Kakao Webtoon and KakaoPage are both active platforms. They both publish webtoons with separate PD teams, but no one I’ve ever met can answer the question of why. Just a side note.

Daum Gets AXZ’d

Last year, the news in Korea was consistently publishing reports that Kakao was looking to offload some of their heavier businesses. Rumors from the sale of Kakao Entertainment as well as the sale of Daum were all over the place. The former was put to rest, but the latter looks to be true as in late 2025, Kakao spun-off Daum under a company named AXZ. AXZ currently operates the Daum news, search, shopping, cafe, email and blogging services and is rumored to be up for sale.

While the company has made incremental updates to the services over the past few months, the removal of Kakao Webtoon from the Daum frontpage is a considerable step in removing the Kakao branding from Daum.

If Kakao does divest themselves from Daum, it would continue in a long pattern of Korean companies lightening their load as the Korean content industry has seen major signs of shrinkage including Big Green’s recent 300 million USD loss for Q4 of 2025.

From Naver’s closure of Yonder, Kidari Studio’s closure KDKD, or even Kakao’s own closure of Radish, the time of massive expansion has come to an end in large part due to the reality of content monetization post-COVID.

The merger of Daum and Kakao was seen as one of the biggest news items in Korea, the long-standing and former lead of the Korean tech industry joining hands with a company at the forefront of social media in Korea.

The removal of the Kakao Webtoon link from Daum’s homepage signals the end of an era. Of course, it’s only newsworthy to semi-old folks like yours truly who even remember the service before it’s rebrand.

And considering the closure of webtoon mainstays like KTOON, Peanutoon, and Blice, it’s almost fitting to see Daum’s link to webtoon industry be one of the last ones to survive.

We’ll see how Daum fares, it’s currently being evaluated for sale to Upstage. And, of course, Kakao Webtoon is in no danger of being shut down (although again, it’s existence is still a question mark). Practically speaking, the sale of Daum and the removal of the Kakao Webtoon link from Daum isn’t going to affect many.

But, we can still take a moment to pour one out for Daum Webtoon.