How to Launch a New Webtoon

Or, at least, how the Korean platforms are doing it.

If there’s one topic that comes up at every webtoon platform and publisher, it’s launch strategies.

When and how a webtoon launches is generally considered to heavily determine the first month’s revenue and have an impact on how the series performs during the lifetime of its publication.

In this post, I’ll be talking about the launch of new titles, not relaunches of older titles or launches of previously published titles on new platforms (non-exclusive launches).

Let’s jump in.

The Variables at Play

It’s important to cover the basics. For webtoon titles published on Korean platforms, there are four factors that platform operators, webtoon creators, and webtoon producers are able to adjust:

• launch date

• number of launch episodes

• number of free episodes

• publishing schedule

For now, let’s focus on the last one: publishing schedule. At one point, there were multiple publishing schedules ranging from twice weekly to once every 10 days, but the modern market has mostly settled on weekly publication as the publishing schedule of choice.

The only platform with a major difference is Lezhin who has used the “Weekly 4/5” schedule which keeps a weekly publishing schedule for 4 weeks and takes the fifth week as a hiatus.

Launch dates for most platforms focus on the publishing day, Monday titles will launch on Mondays while Tuesdays on Tuesdays and so on. This isn’t necessarily the best or most profitable method of launching titles, it’s just easier on platform operations teams.

Finally the number of free episodes and launch episodes are, traditionally, a hotly contested subject. The end of each free episode should end in a nail-biting cliffhanger… but then again so should each paid episode. Generally, everyone agrees that the last free episode should end in a way to drive the user to purchasing the first paid episode.

Pricing is generally uniform across titles or set to specific standards determined by age, genre, etc and it’s usually set by the platform. As such, it’ll be considered a constant for the purposes of this post.

Measuring Success

There are multiple metrics for determining whether or not a webtoon launch was successful. These can be revenue, subscribers (or favorite count), or conversion rate (the percentage of users who pay for locked episodes compared to the total number of free episode viewers). But my opinion has always been that view count is the best determination of whether a launch campaign has been successful or not.

For every campaign, by the time launch protocols are being discussed, launch content has already been finalized. And how “good” or compelling a title is will increase or decrease its likelihood of earning high revenue or coverting free users to paid users.

It’s important to note that launch protocols are a part of marketing, not content production. And therefore, we’re looking for the number of “eyes on” when a title launches, otherwise known as the view count.

Market Strategies

For the purposes of this post, I looked at several platforms but stuck to the longest running English webtoon platforms (WEBTOON, Tapas, Lezhin) and included Manta for good measure. I left out non-exlusive launches (re-launches of older titles) because those tend to be full-launches where the entire series goes up on one day.

It’s important to remember that WEBTOON, Tapas, Lezhin and Manta have completely different monetization and publishing schemes. Where as WEBTOON’s ongoing exclusive titles are mostly free with a static number of paid episodes, Tapas, Lezhin, and Manta are the opposite with a static number of free episodes and a growing number of paid episodes as the series publishes.

And in the grouping of the three “premium” webtoon platforms, Tapas and Lezhin utilize Wait-Until-Free while Manta focuses more on its Unlimited subscription. And further still, Tapas uses Wait-Until-Free almost uniformly across all their titles while most of Lezhin’s catalogue isn’t Wait-Until-Free.

Phew. Now let’s get to the launch strategies actually employed by WEBTOON, Tapas, Lezhin and Manta.