So the big news in webcomics over the past month and change is that A) Disney and Webtoon announced a licensing agreement last month such that Webtoon would host comics from Marvel, Star Wars, and other Disney-owned properties, and B) Disney and Webtoon announced yesterday that this would be done via a new, as-yet-unnamed platform. (Though presumably, it would look similar to Webtoon's current one.) There was a fair amount of hoopla during both announcements, and Webtoon's stock price rose markedly in the wake of each announcement.
What has largely gotten omitted from the discussion, though, is those stock bumps -- while pretty nice from a percentage point of view -- amount to very little. Webtoon launched their initial public offering (IPO) in mid-2024 at around $21 US per share. It dropped to almost half of that within the first month and spent the rest of 2024 hovering between $10-$13 US and the first half of 2025 just below $10 US. So the "huge" stock price bump of ~90% from last August meant they got as high as $18 before dropping back to $14 the next day. Better than they had been doing, but we're talking about four, maybe five dollars difference. Yesterday's announcement also cited a "soaring" stock increase of 55%... except that 55% is based on a month-over-month comparison from just before the first announcment. The stock price went from $14.27 US to $15.98 US. And within an hour, it settled back down to around $14.90 making the actual increase from yesterday's announcement... four percent. Not nothing, but it's a far cry from 55%!
Webtoon's quarterly report from August -- literally days before the first Disney deal was announced -- showed they ran a net loss of $3.9 million US for the second quarter, after a net loss of $22 million US in the first quarter. Their third quarter outlook projected revenue growth about equal to what they did in the second quarter, suggesting they'll probably be operating at a loss of ~4 million US again unless they somehow found a way to cut a boatload of expenses. We won't know for sure until they release their Q3 report, probably in mid-November.
Back in 2021 -- before Webtoon went public and had to disclose their financials -- I noted that Naver, who wholly owned Webtoon before the IPO -- was ostensibly running that part of the business at a loss. Naver had wrapped their Webtoon operations up among other business segments for Naver's financial reporting, so we couldn't see any details, but that was the rumor going around. While Webtoon rightly notes in some of their more recent financial disclosures that launching an IPO is expensive and that explains many of their loss numbers from 2024, that's not an excuse they'll be able to fall back on for long.
Now, Disney owns two percent of Webtoon per yesterday's announcement. (Or at least it will once a bunch of paperwork gets formalized.) Theoretically, Disney has a lot of talented accountants and lawyers that think this is a good idea, so there must be something to this, right?
Well, maybe. My counter-argument to that is that when Disney sees something they have great confidence in, they will buy it outright. Marvel, for example. There was no "well, let's get a stake in the company and see how it goes before buying them." They saw Marvel had their shit together, had something of great value, and Disney just dropped a ton of cash to own it. They're very much NOT doing that with Webtoon. They easily could. A controlling portion of Webtoon -- before Disney announced any deals with them -- would've cost around $600 million US if they just bought the necessary number of shares on the open market. If they worked out an actual agreement, it probably would've been closer to $300 million US. Not chump change, but this is the same company that bought Marvel for $4 Billion US in 2009 (about $6 Billion US today).
So, in my mind, Disney getting a 2% stake in Webtoon is barely worth mentioning. Their bigger deal is whatever Webtoon is paying them to license Spider-Man and Darth Vader, and the 2% stake just means they get some extra profit if it suddenly becomes wildly successful.
Which is by no means a sure thing. In the first place, I'll refer to the news from back in May when Webtoon changed their primary platform by dropping their "Daily Pass" option and effectively charging more for less. Enshittification of the platform, which I had predicted several weeks earlier.
In the second place, if Webtoon is launching a SECOND platform for their Disney-related material, that means that they will have effectively zero crossover users. People who come to the platform to read Star Wars will not see or have access to any webtoons over on their 'main' platform. And any existing users likely won't bother trying to create a separate login with separate costs to read Disney material. Webtoon will be siloing their audiences. Granted, the two sets of audiences probably don't have a LOT of overlap, but by putting them in separate silos, there will be ZERO.
In the third place, my understanding is that this new platform will be hosting old material. Basically doing what Comixology did before Amazon bought it. You'll be able to read Amazing Fantasy #15 and Fantastic Four #256 and whatever else is in their back catalog. But none of that was created for the vertical scroll format. Yes, they can retroactively adjust the layouts and reconfigure things so they will work... but that's just another version of Comixology's "Guided View" option, which was okay for what it was but it still made for awkward reading since, again, none of those comics were designed to be read that way. Guided View made things less bad than just trying to sort through a whole page on a small screen, but "less bad" is not a great user experience.
I don't wish ill against Webtoons, and don't want to rain on their parade exactly, but I think it's worth keeping some perspective here too. The Disney deal is significant but not enough to fully bridge the gap between the lofty IPO expectations and the day-to-day realities of running a business about webcomics. I think what we're looking at here is a company trying very hard to make things work, and they've thrown a crudload of time and money at it. But given their current operations, I don't think there's anything to be particularly excited about. This Disney deal doesn't strike me as likely to bring in a ton of opertaing capital -- if the licensing costs themselves don't increase their quarterly losses -- and I would just urge any creators posting through Webtoon to make sure that that isn't their ONLY venue for posting/earning money from their webcomic. You should never rely on a single source to begin with, and this setup with Disney doesn't strike me as being able to change Webtoon's direction.
0 comments:
Post a Comment