Does Piracy Hurt the Webtoon Industry?

Let's unpack a bit.

The webtoon, anime, and manga industries have been having a banner year when it comes to the fight against piracy. The biggest news item was the shutdown of HiAnime which was the site of choice for a massive number of content consumers on the internet (IGN).

And that was after HiAnime was placed on the US Government’s watchlist (IMDb), not that this was a recent develoment.

Likewise, here in Korea there’s been a lot of progress in the war against webtoon and webnovel piracy.

Back in March, a civil sentence against the operator of “Ajitoon” (a Korean webtoon and webnovel pirate site) was upheld whereby they have been ordered to pay 2 billion KRW in damages to Kakao and Naver (AsiaE) after they’d been sentenced to 2 years in prison.

More recently, the biggest webtoon and webnovel pirate in Korea, Newtokki announced they would shut down after a court order back in April (Chosun Biz). And now that we’re getting to June, we’re starting to see what kind of impact the shutdown of Newtokki has had on the Korean industry.

Never heard of Newtokki? I kind of figured.

Let’s Look at Newtokki. And Manatokki. And Bamtokki.

Newtokki, one of Korea’s biggest webtoon/manga/webnovel pirate sites, voluntarily shut down on April 27th. It was the latest and largest iteration of the “Bamtokki” pirate sites, a previously operational pirate site that popularized the “-tokki” moniker’s use in Korean piracy.

The shutdown preceded the implementation of an amendment to Korea’s Copyright Act which would’ve fast-tracked the blocking of illegal sites and strengthened punishments for copyright violators with up to seven years in prison or fines up to 100 million KRW.

The shutdown was punctuated with an announcement that Newtokki, Manatokki, and Booktokki would all be shutting down at midnight on April 27th and all user data would be deleted immediately.

But, in the aftermath, at least four new pirate sites were spotted using the “-tokki” moniker and claiming to the successors to the Newtokki site (Chosun Biz). And, while the shutdown of the original Newtokki site was indeed a success for creatives, recent reports have stated that the new system implemented by the amendment of the Copyright Act hasn’t worked as intended.

By opening new domains after old addresses are blocked and maintaining users via Telegram, the operation of pirate sites is certainly more troublesome, but by no means is it impossible.

In short, we whacked a mole. It was a big mole. Now, there are more moles.

Cause, Meet Effect.

The closure of Korea’s single largest piracy group has had an effect, one readily visible to even indie creators.

Earlier this month, Money Today highlighted a quote from Hyun-wook, a webtoon creator here in South Korea who’s been publishing titles since 2009, long enough to have been around prior to the international boom and the massive domestical surge before webtoon studios took over the mainstream market.

Specifically, multiple news outlets have focused in on the following tweet.

In his tweet, Hyun-wook went on to explain that his paid revenue increased by three times month-on-month after [Newtokki] (erroneously referred to as Bamtokki in the tweet) was shut down.

Not long after, a webnovel author added their own two cents saying that their revenue had increased by 2.5 times over.

Both of these tweets should be taken in context.

First, Hyun-wook’s titles are from an earlier generation of webtoon titles. And while they were popular in their day, they are not top-tier titles. An increase in revenue, while important, may not represent a significant pattern across the industry.

Secondly… I can’t find any evidence of the retweeting webnovel author’s works or whether they have paid content available on the internet. While it’s no doubt possible that they do, without any actual evidence it’s hard to put any stock in the quote.

And while I can’t vouch for these experiences… I can vouch for another.

Rewind to 2021

One of more comprehensive articles on the topic of webtoon piracy was published back in 2021 by Anime News Network.

The post followed a period of piracy upheaval during which English webtoon piracy sites were (a) shutting down or (b) finding themselves undergoing extended outages.

It was at this time that Anime News Network pulled together interviews and quotes from webtoon creators on Twitter and emailed responses from publishers, most notably Lezhin Comics.

I know I said comprehensive earlier, but the post was lacking in teeth. There are a few numbers thrown around, but nothing that’s damning or gives the context of scale when discussing the effect of piracy on the webtoon industry.

The best that Lezhin could muster as far as a “damning quote” was the following:

“When one of the biggest piracy sites in North America shut down for two weeks, we saw an increase in our own numbers.”

Just… ugh.

I’ve read that quote a handful of times and it annoys the hell out of me each time. And for good reason. I helped write the damned thing.

For context, at the time of Anime News Network’s article, I was head of US publishing at Lezhin and working as the de facto PR manager. I wrote press releases, made contacts with webtoon blogs, and eventually took over the TikTok and Twitter accounts for LezhinUS.

But at the exact time that Anime News Network was publishing their post, I was writing an internal memo about the outage of a prominent webtoon piracy site and the increase in revenue we saw sitewide.

It wasn’t just one or two titles performing above average, it was multiple titles and entire genres shifting upwards in ways that literally millions of dollars in marketing couldn’t.

The biggest webtoon pirate site in the US shut down for 2 weeks in 2021 and webtoon publishers had a peek at what the market could look like. Maybe even should.

I can’t say the exact numbers, obviously. A mixture of NDA and time prevent me from being too open or even remembering the exact figures. I can say that the market looked unrecognizable during that short two week period.

So does piracy hurt the webtoon industry?

It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. But if we’re boiling it down to brass tacks, the answer is really simple.

Yes, it does. A fuckton.