This Week in Webtoon-ish, August 23rd
TOPCO finally makes their plans for female-centric webtoons public.
After the rush of quarterly statements last week, this is a relatively slow news week.
We have webtoon publishers spreading their wings into new genres (TOPCO), new media (WEBTOON), and new markets (Soosung Webtoon, sort of).
Let’s get to it.
TOPCO Media Tops Line Manga with a Romance Title
In news that should surprise most, TOPCO Media, known mainly for their hardcore adult webtoons geared towards male audiences, topped the charts at Line MANGA with a romance title “To Catch the Eye of a High-Spec Prince” on launch day.
While this might come out of left-field for most, TOPCO has actually released a handful of high-performing webtoons into the Korean, Japanese and international market at large. With this latest launch, they’ve announcd plans to launch 9 more female-centric webtoons this year and 20 more for next year.
Source: Newsis
Ringo Awards Nominees are Up
This year’s nominees are up and, in addition to including some amazing traditionally published stories, we’ve also got the webcomics category featuring a mix of WEBTOON, Tapas, and Manta titles.
The Croaking (WEBTOON)
Daughter of a Thousand Faces (Tapas)
The Mafia Nanny (WEBTOON)
Under the Oak Tree (Manta)
Vampire Family (WEBTOON)
Interestingly, the only Korean title is Under the Oak Tree which RIDI has been very public in pushing for the western market.
Source: Ringo Awards
WEBTOON Launches Short-Motion Webtoon Episodes
This week, WEBTOON rolled out their new short-motion webtoon episodes which are 4 to 7 minute short videos on their platform. The feature is currently available for 14 WEBTOON Originals titles with 20 episodes each available for free-viewing.
Source: WEBTOON IR
Soosung Webtoon Shifts Their Japan Strategy
Soosung Webtoon is changing up their game in Japan and increasing the number of third-party webtoon platforms they’ll be distributing their webtoons through. Last year, Soosung Webtoon announced they would be working with Amazon Fliptoons, Amazon’s Japan-based webtoon service, and this week they’ve announced they will be expanding further to other platforms in Japan.
Soosung operates in Japan directly through their Toomics Japan platform, but with the addition of Terapin titles which are largely made up of romance romance fantasy titles, they need more platforms that aren’t focused heavily on male-audiences like Toomics is.
Source: Asia E