Novel content, which was established as an enjoyment among college students in the 1990s under the name of’Internet Novel’ in the 2000s, has developed into a’web novel’ in 2013 and continues to enjoy great popularity. According to the Korea Creative Content Agency, the Korean web novel market has grown from 10 billion won in 2013 to 600 billion won. It has increased 60 times since the appearance of web novels.
In recent years, as major web novel platforms such as Naver and Kakao have expanded to global platforms targeting the world’s readers beyond Korea, the influence of Korean web novels is expected to increase.
On January 21 this year, Naver acquired the Canadian web novel platform Wattpad. Whatpad is the world’s largest storytelling platform with 90 million global readers, and has shown room for growth into a larger platform through the 1 billion novel contents that Watpad has.
In addition, Naver will develop a number of web novel contents into webtoons and advance in a way that can develop both web fiction and webtoon fields. In response, Naver Webtoon CEO Kim Joon-koo said, “We have secured a more diverse story content through Whatpad. We will make web novel writers more active overseas expansion through Naver Webtoon, just as Korean writers are active globally.” Revealed.
Currently, web novels are gaining popularity in Korea only with their own contents, but they have evolved into secondary contents and are also produced as dramas, webtoons, and audio dramas, attracting more fans and readers. ‘The Empress Remarried’, which is recently being serialized as a popular Naver web novel, has accumulated 100 million downloads and accumulated sales of more than 4 billion won, and the drama production is confirmed, raising expectations. In 2019, it was also produced as a webtoon, consumed in Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan, and France, and is currently serializing audio dramas on Naver.
As such, web novels are reborn as secondary content, and their influence is growing not only in Korea but also globally, and furthermore, it is expected to develop into Korea’s representative content such as’Sweet Home’, which hit the world with Netflix original drama last year.