The global online video service (OTT) market is a battlefield among the battlefields where Naver and Kakao take care of their daily’deal’ as next-generation food. It is based on the already heated webtoon and web fiction market, so it is a derivative and second game. Both sides are planning to become the number one leader in the explosively growing OTT market by preoccupying the’story’ that is the basis of killer content.
At present, it is difficult to conceal the superiority and inferiority, and it is the appearance of’General Menggun’. Naver acquired Canadian Wattpad, the world’s largest web novel distributor, for 65.2 billion won in January. This is Naver’s largest investment in external corporations ever. With the acquisition of WhatPad, Naver has secured a large number of story IPs (intellectual property rights), the core of the entertainment industry such as webtoon. Founded in 2006, Wattpad is the world’s largest web novel distribution service used by more than 90 million people around the world. It has over 1 billion contents written by more than 5 million authors. With this acquisition, Naver became the No. 1 operator in both webtoon and web novel distribution.
Kakao also invested 76 billion won last year with Softbank Ventures, a global web novel distributor, Radish. Radish is a competitor to Watpad that Naver acquired.
The reason why the two companies are concentrating on’story content’ enough to take over foreign competitors is because of the derivative effect of expanding the business to other entertainment markets. The OTT market is one of them. Recently, global OTT operators such as Netflix and Disney Plus are focusing on finding stories to be produced in movies and dramas.
‘Sweet Home’, which is Netflix’s exclusive content made from the original work distributed on Naver Webtoon, ranked first in Netflix’s viewing ranking last month in 8 countries including Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Qatar, Thailand and Vietnam. The movie’Seungriho’ produced by Kakao Page recently rose to the top of the Netflix movie rankings. Naver currently has 77 webtoons with movies and dramas. Kakao is also working on producing dozens of webtoons as videos.
According to the global accounting and consulting company Price Water House Coopers (PwC), the global OTT market is expected to increase from $52.29 billion (approximately 58,576.4 billion won) last year to $66.89 billion next year (approximately 73,8875 billion won). to be.
Reporter Kim Joo-wan [email protected]
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