Émilie Coudrat (Naver Webtoon): “Our ambition is to reverse the ratio between international titles and French titles”

The Naver Webtoon platform, a pioneer in vertical reading on smartphones, is today a market juggernaut with 85 million monthly users worldwide. Émilie Coudrat, the development manager of its French subsidiary, explains to L’Internaute why the South Korean giant waited until 2019 to launch its platform in the land of Asterix and the challenges for the future.

At the end of the 1990s, an economic crisis hit the book market in South Korea hard. Comic book publishers have been decimated and the majority have gone out of business. At the same time, Korean society as a whole was shifting towards “new technologies”. “Considering the crisis of Korean comics and the penetration rate of smartphones, Lee Hae-jin, the founder of Naver (main search engine in South Korea and today a tech giant, editor’s note), imagined a format of infinite scroll reading, this is the birth of the Webtoon platform”, explains Émilie Coudrat, the development manager of the French subsidiary of Naver Webtoon.

Since then, webtoons have established themselves in global popular culture and many platforms have hatched. Naver and Piccoma remain the main content creators. Born in 2004 in Korea after a crisis that hit the manhwa, the platform has become a juggernaut. What is the vision of the French market in the medium and long term for the Korean “Google”? What is the first assessment of its installation? Émilie Coudrat, Naver Webtoon’s development manager in France, responds to L’Internaute.

Internet user: why did you wait until 2019 to launch Webtoon in France?

Emilie Coudrat: It is above all a practical question. Even if the French comics market is important, particularly manga, Webtoon is only a branch of the Naver group. We aim to develop the group as a whole. The USA represents a gigantic market, very adept at new technologies, and which moreover has a large American-Korean community. Naver arrived in France in 2017, through the tech and start-up ecosystem. For example, we bought an artificial intelligence research center that belonged to Xerox, and today this Naver Labs Europe employs around a hundred researchers. We have also invested in Station F. Korelya Capital, the investment fund led by Fleur Pellerin, has entered into a partnership with Naver, again inviting us to invest in the French ecosystem. This allowed us as an entity to acculturate ourselves to the French environment, to then decide which services of the Naver galaxy to deploy in France. After two years of pushing consumer services aimed at 15-25 year olds, we decided to launch the Webtoons.com platform accessible via website but also applications for smartphones and tablets.

Three years and a pandemic later, what is the state of the market?

Since the launch, the audience has changed enormously. We opened the service by focusing on our specialty: the female target of 18-25 years old. Very strong in the romance and drama genres, Korean creation has seen the emergence of several emblematic titles. It’s a very loyal readership. We then went looking for a more “shônen” readership for the French market, with action and fantasy titles. Today, 55% of our audience is female and the majority of our readership is in the 18-25 age group. From the start of the Covid, we rose in France to more than 2 million monthly readers, 85 worldwide. But I believe that we only measured the impact of this popularity this summer, at Japan Expo. There was incredible enthusiasm.

You cannot translate all of your content into French. How do you choose which titles to translate?

We are starting from the trends that we have observed on the American market. Hallyu has laid the foundations of Korean culture all over the world. Today, no title in our catalogs could be rejected for lack of education, or lack of context. Finally, if the settings and temperaments change, we have stories that have common values ​​with other cultures. However, we are beginning to see the emergence of content specific to France and Europe. What works very well at the moment is the “Middle Ages romance”, all these medieval love stories, with very Europeanized castles and folklore.

How do you measure the success of a series? And the platform?

As a company of technological innovation, we are very connected to data. We analyze a lot of data and drive for success. We monitor the number of page views per series, dropout rate, engagement (ratings and comments), and assign a score based on all of this data.

At the application level, for me Webtoons.com will be a success when the French-speaking site is “driven” by local creations. Our primary ambition is to reverse the ratio between international securities and French securities. We are actively looking for French-speaking creators.

When I see series like Because I Can’t Love You Where colossalI tell myself that we are not far from this goal. colossal brilliantly combines humor and local culture. It’s very difficult to make an international comedy, because humor is perhaps the least transposable genre. We even have series with a design quite far from webtoon standards that are very successful, like Amber Castle. It’s very interesting to see creatives take hold of social phenomena such as self-acceptance, the multiplicity of sexualities and even take an interest in the postulates of dystopias.

What business model for authors?

For those who are called “the original creators” – with whom we sign a contract for a season that extends from 20 to 54 episodes – we pay them their royalties on a monthly basis or with each delivery. episode, on a case-by-case basis. We do not advance fees.

Then there is a variable part linked to advertising revenue. At the end of each episode, on the application, we have an advertisement sold by our management. We share this income and, for certain French series, the volume of views makes it possible to significantly improve its income.

Finally, and this is why our editorial teams help our authors improve their stories, we have licenses that have another life. They can be published in physical form – which is a particularity of the French market – or benefit from an adaptation on a cinema, television or animation medium. Even an international translation. This of course generates new income for our authors.

With regard to the merchandising part, some creators keep all the rights.

Do you support authors other than at the editorial level?

Absolutely. We produce a lot of educational tools such as online seminars, with tips and advice for creating a webtoon. These tips are not only editorial, for example we have planning management tools, courses on how to create a collection of sets so as not to get tired of reproducing or redrawing the same scenes… We also have workshops for teach framing techniques inherited from cinema adapted to the use of webtoon: how to use a “zoom in”, when to tighten the frame, etc.

We often have the impression of seeing the same castle in webtoons…

Sets are secondary in webtoons. What matters above all are the characters, their emotions and their reactions. It is possible that some artists use databases for part of their decorations.

As a tech-savvy company, are you working on developing tools?

Absolutely. Teams in France, based at Station F, work on areas related to webtoon. Everything that could make life easier for creative people: lettering, translation, colorization. At headquarters in Seoul, they are also exploring these issues, but we are still quite far from an applicable result.

And tomorrow ?

We are working to set up a form of academy for young authors. Training is crucial for us.

For now, out of our 350 titles, we have 70 French creations. We can manage this number of authors with our editorial team. We supervise them and we try to train them individually, but in the future our “pool” of authors will grow faster than our teams. We try to bring together the communities of creators so that they know each other but also can help each other. Many have adopted Discord to have virtual artist workshops. It is an eminently cooperative environment. There are a lot of authors who are on Twitch too.

To go further in this logic of education, we try to evangelize the webtoon before the artists leave their schools. We are in contact with several schools of comics and illustration but also animation like the Gobelins. We offer webtoon initiation sessions in about fifteen establishments in France.

We explain that there is an outlet in the world of webtoon, even that it is probably easier to break into it today than in the world of Franco-Belgian comics. Then we explain the medium, we dissect the best practices and we initiate the creation. Even if the best learning is to read as much as possible.

Today, a creator who we consider not yet mature enough to join our “Originals” program is invited to post his work on our amateur platform Canvas, which already has more than 10,000 titles. Anyone can create a webtoon. Every month, we highlight series on the platform and we give bonuses that can go up to €300.

How do we moderate this platform if anyone can upload anything?

We have dedicated moderation teams. Everything is read, but moderation is done a posteriori. We not only moderate webtoons, but also comments. For now, the community is very benevolent and we have not had to worry more than that.

What about the transposition of comics into webtoons? :

“Webtoonizing” a series is not easy. It is in my opinion more difficult than creating a new story. Storytelling at a completely different pace. It is necessary to ensure peaks of tension at each chapter. The soft underbelly of a Franco-Belgian album lends itself less well to this type of format which favors tension and almost permanent cliffhangers. With the webtoon, in each chapter you virtually put your readership back into play. Not to mention the staging which is completely different. In the webtoon, the decorations are almost absent, what matters is to control the reading speed by playing with the spaces. In the end, a webtoon is closer to a movie or TV series storyboard.