Things are happening in vertical video. Just last week, we wrote about MicroCo, a new startup that thinks it can succeed where Quibi failed if it uses AI to keep production costs low. Then there’s MrBeast, whose plan to sell more of his Moose Toys figures involves an animated series, posted on YouTube in bite-size vertical segments.
Webtoon‘s recently revealed video ambitions are a sort of half-and-half between those two cases, minus any AI involvement. It told Business Insider that to drive more traffic to its top titles, it’s producing short-form adaptations it hopes will appeal to Gen Z.
Webtoon and its sister platform Wattpad have around 150 million users, and between the two of them, they’ve cornered the market on user-uploaded digital novels and comics. Their business plan involves turning those webnovels and comics into official adaptations. But up until now, adaptations have been mostly focused on developing webnovels into comics, and novels and comics into long-form films and TV shows. Short-form, and vertical video, are new.
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For this first fleet of short videos, Webtoon picked 14 English-language comics across various genres. Adaptations involve some still images interspersed with full animations, fleshed-out voice acting, sound effects, and music.
Creator Jessica Ramsden (aka Ro-taniah) is among those whose projects were selected for vertical video. Her gay YA series Star Catcher follows closed-off main character Lucas as he finds new love–and new life–at the homey Star Valley University.
Ramsden describes Webtoon’s short-form adaptations as webcomics’ version of anime, and a way to meet people “halfway” if they’re more watchers than readers.
“I know there’s a much broader audience that might not know [Star Catcher] exists because they don’t read comics,” she said. “I love manga, but there’s people who only watch the anime version of it, and this can meet them halfway.”
Ramsden told Business Insider she worked with the Webtoon team on the character design and voice acting, making sure the vertical video version matched what she envisions for her comic.
As for the biz/rights side of this, webcomic creators keep total ownership of their IPs, but share ownership of the video adaptations with Webtoon. With webcomics, Webtoon has a 50/50 ad revenue split with creators, so it’s possible that might end up being the model for video, too.
At launch, though, video adaptations will be ad-free and free to watch, so no revenue is coming in. Webtoon told BI it plans to add advertising to videos in the future.
It’s not clear yet whether Webtoon plans to post adaptations only on its platform, or on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Either way, vertical video is a strong bid for more engagement–especially engagement with The Youths.
As we said above, this is a sort of middle point between what MicroCo and MrBeast are doing. Webtoon is staunchly anti-AI, so antithetical to MicroCo in that way, but it’s still aiming to appeal to the modern audience with quick-hit content that can stand up to TikTok brainrot attention spans.
And, of course, the ultimate goal here is to drive more traffic, and thus more revenue. Considering how frequently Hollywood looks online for fresh ideas these days, Webtoon’s short adaptations may even garner enough attention to bait big studios into signing longer projects–something it’d no doubt be happy to see.
