Japan’s manga industry released thousands of new titles last year, while Korea’s webtoon scene is home to an immense volume of series. Yet, much of this vast content remains just one step away from reaching entirely new audiences.
The market signals
Japan’s domestic manga market contracted in 2025 for the first time in 8 years. Print volumes fell 14.4%. The total market pulled back to ¥693 billion, about $4.4 billion, ending a streak that had run since 2017.
The revealing detail is what publishers did in response: they released more. New manga volume releases jumped 6.5% to over 16,000 titles - the largest annual increase since 2008. Kadokawa alone grew new releases by 13% while total sales fell 10%.
Korea’s webtoon market is growing - the global market reached $6.6 billion in 2025 at nearly 19% annual growth - but the same pressure is building underneath. More series competing for the same reader attention. More platform spend on discovery, ads, featured placements, algorithm tuning. The cost of surfacing any individual title keeps rising as the catalog deepens.
Both markets have proven, catalog-scale content depth. The opportunity is finding a growth surface the depth of the catalog itself enables.
Data moves faster than intuition
The major Japanese publishers didn’t arrive at multi-format IP by accident. The model - originating in manga, proving audience response, expanding into anime, games, merchandise, and licensing - has been the deliberate strategy of the largest houses for decades. What changed is the speed at which it can operate and the data that now drives it.
The digital shift in manga has given publishers something they never had in print: real-time global reader data. Which chapters drive drop-off. Which characters generate engagement. In which cities a title is gaining ground before anyone in the licensing department has noticed.
Japan’s domestic digital share has reached nearly 70%.
Publishers are now distributing new chapters simultaneously to global markets and reading the response as it happens.
That data changes the adaptation decision. Publishers can now greenlight based on measured global engagement signals before a single production dollar is spent on video.
The data identifies which titles are ready. The opportunity is turning that signal into video - faster, and across more of the catalog than traditional anime production has ever been able to reach. Licensing revenue has grown substantially at publishers running the multi-format model, but traditional anime production handles only a handful of titles per year. The middle of the catalog, where most IP lives, has been waiting for a production layer that can keep up.
How animated vertical videos reach a new audience
A 60 to 90-second trailer drops a character into a 1 scene - enough to stop the scroll and create curiosity. A 5 to 7-minute episode fits a commute or a short break - long enough to build attachment, short enough to finish before the stop arrives. Both live in the same vertical feed where the target audience already spends significant time, and both end at a moment that sends the viewer back to the source material.
One format finds the audience already there. Animated vertical videos find the ones who haven’t arrived yet.
The publishers and platforms already running this strategy make the mechanism visible. Shueisha launched Jump Toon in 2024, restructuring its format stack for vertical mobile. WEBTOON Entertainment launched 5-minute Video Episodes in August 2025, making its webcomics watchable - deepening engagement for existing fans while opening the format to new audiences through video. Kakao Piccoma opened a dedicated Anime tab on its Japanese platform, adapting existing catalog titles into short-form video with an episode-based access model. In each case, the pattern is the same: video lives alongside the source comic, in the same platform session, as an additional format. Fans who arrive through video find more to read. Readers who find the video stay longer.
StoryCo produces the animated vertical content behind WEBTOON’s Video Episodes - and has delivered 200+ hours across 400+ titles. Real voice performances, sound design, music, built for the phone from the first frame. The production layer the catalog has been waiting for is already running.
The ROI case
An animated vertical series earns across multiple streams at once - video, new readers, deeper engagement from existing fans, and new language markets from the same creative. A campaign stops when the spend stops. An animated series keeps going.
The opportunity is sharpest for titles in the middle of a catalog - series with devoted readers that have never broken through at scale. Video reaches viewers who would never have found the comic. Existing fans get a new dimension of the world they already love. New language versions open markets the static comic could never reach.