Salut! And Hola! There is exciting news for French and Spanish webcomic fans. South Korea’s top portal operator, Naver Corp., has added French and Spanish to its webcomic arm as part of its mission to reach foreign audiences and become a global entertainment player.
Line Webtoon, the global service provided by Naver, added these two European languages in addition to English, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Indonesian. It also recently released 40 webcomic series in Europe to give the fans a taste of what to expect. The series were selected based on surveys conducted in the regions speaking French and Spanish and then translated. Naver is home to a massive range of creator-owned content, covering romance, fantasy, humor, science fiction, comedy, and much, much more.
Focusing on outreach
The webtoon has already shown impressive growth in the US market after entering it in 2014. The number of its monthly active users crossed the 10 million mark in the US last year. It is encouraging readers and writers from other countries to experience their services. It recorded 60 million MAUs globally and is expected to bring in $519 million in revenue. It is reportedly the top-grossing animation app on Google Play Store in over 100 countries. It also plans to introduce more languages to its efforts to increase its foothold in the global market.
It also very recently acquired Korean artificial intelligence (AI) startup V.DO which is supported by Naver’s startup accelerator D2 Startup Factory (D2SF). The company is stepping up its push to strengthen content competitiveness by collaborating with V.DO and using various technologies such as AI and computer vision.
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