Genres
Webtoon
South Korean episodic digital comics built as one long vertical scroll for smartphones; the comics sibling of the web novel.
A webtoon is a type of episodic digital comic that originated in South Korea and is usually meant to be read on a smartphone: each episode is published as one long, vertical strip, mostly in color, sometimes with music and animation. Portal sites (Daum from 2003, Naver from 2004) made the form free and habitual, and Naver's global WEBTOON service counted 180 million monthly users as of September 2023. Monetization mixes limited free chapters, daily caps and ads, with creator income tied to views.
For prose serialists, webtoons are the adjacent medium Korean web fiction grew up beside: web novels boomed in the 2010s after webtoons in the 2000s, sharing the episodic pay model and the drama adaptation pipeline. Reader expectations for episodic, phone-first stories cross between the two. See Korean web novel and the serial platform landscape.