This image captured from Piccoma shows its Japanese service.
SEOUL, Oct. 11 (Korea Bizwire) — Korean-made webtoon services are gaining popularity in Japan.
Japan’s MMD Laboratory reported that LINE Manga was most the widely used webtoon app at 41.9 percent as of June, followed by Piccoma at 37.3 percent.
LINE Manga is operated by LINE, a Japanese mobile messenger arm of South Korea’s top Internet portal operator Naver Corp., and Piccoma is Kakao Corp.’s online comic platform in Japan.
Kakao is an operator of South Korea’s top mobile messenger KakaoTalk.
LINE Manga and Piccoma were the top two most widely used webtoon apps in Japan in 2020.
Japanese media outlets said that the vertical scrolling system of the two apps, a unique distinction from from the page-turning, horizontal scrolling system, had attracted users.
Research Institute for Publications reported that Japan’s e-manga market stood at 149.1 billion yen (US$1.02 billion) in 2016 before almost tripling to 411.4 billion yen over the next five years, accounting for 90 percent of Japan’s e-book market and surpassing the size of the country’s paper manga market by a factor of 1.5.
Lina Jang (linajang@koreabizwire.com)
