WEBTOON's Q2 are Up. Let's take a look.
No witty subtitle this time.
Another quarter, another review of Big Green’s quarterly financials.
This time around, I’ll be looking at the SEC filing rather than the summarized version that I usually go over. For anyone who wants to read it for themselves, check it out here.
For the rest of us, let’s get going.
The Big Number
Revenue dropped to 338.465 million USD representing a 2.8% decrease in Q2 revenue YoY (from 348.271 million USD in 2025).
Revenue by itself isn’t an indicator of the business’ health, operational viability, or even whether the business is on the right path towards achieving their goals.
So, obviously, we need to drill deeper.
Where is the Revenue Coming From?
WEBTOON separates their revenue into three categories: paid content, advertising, IP adaptations.
Paid content: 263.941 million USD(3.99% decrease YoY)
Advertising: 47.124 million USD (4.21% increase YoY)
IP adaptations: 27.4 million USD (2.62% decrease YoY)
Paid content is revenue arising from purchase of Coins which are then spent unlocking episodes on the platform. It’s the largest part of the pie which makes sense as WEBTOON is, first and foremost, a content publisher. Interestingly, paid content also includes 2.6 million USD of physical book sales through the platform for Q2 and 5.0 million USD of physical book sales in H1.
Advertising is the revenue from display ads as well as product placement within content. The ratio isn’t available here, but in all likelihood it’s skewed towards display ads or ad partnerships rather than product placement.
Finally, IP adaptations revenue is the internal development of film, streaming series, or other format adaptations commissioned by third party studios and or platforms. Basically, this would encompass everything from the K-dramas on Netflix to… the K-dramas on Amazon Prime. There’s other stuff, too, but that’s the most successful stuff we’ve seen. Interesting, this gets further broken down to include two sub categories: licensing from sublicensing content which attributes 8.0 million USD (Q2) and 11 million USD (H1), and finally merch sales (external platforms, IP royalties, and pop-ups) to 1.9 million USD (Q2) and 3.3 million USD (H1).
The total revenue gets broken down by region once more into three buckets: Korea, Japan, and Rest of World.
Korea: 138.49 million USD (10.1% increase YoY)
Japan: 150.403 million USD (15.5% decrease YoY)
Rest of World: 49.572 million USD (11% increase YoY)
The Good.
Yes, there’s good stuff to be seen.
IP adaptation has had some decent wins over the past quarter with “Teach You a Lesson” and “Yumi’s Cells” returning for a third season, virtually unheard of in the Korean entertainment sphere.
And the continued expansion into print is going to be a necessary set of revenue for digital publishers and platforms like WEBTOON.
Based on the regional readout, WEBTOON is back to finding their footing in Korea. They saw a 10.1% increase in revenue for the Korean market and an 11% increase in revenue for the rest of the world. This matches of with the MAU (monthly active user) data trends that showed a 5.6% increase in MAU for Korea (24.3 million) and a 0.18% increase in MAU for the rest of the world (110.7 million).
The MPU (monthly paying users) also saw increases in Korea to 3.8 million (11.8% increase YoY) and in the Rest of the World is at 1.7 million which stayed even from last year.
The Bad.
Japan.
The revenue from Japan logged in at 150.403 million USD, down 15.4% from the 177.881 million USD in 2025. Since 2024, we’ve been seeing news articles in Korea about LINE Manga has seen increases in the market at a consistent rate.
Those increases hit the wall in 2025 and we’re now seeing the downslope as Naver struggles in the second biggest paid digital webtoon market in the world. The MAU in Japan similarly saw a drop from 22.6 million in Q2 2025 down to 21.8 million while the MPU dropped 8.7% to 2.1 million from 2.3 million in 2025.
