Presented by WEBTOON
WEBTOON’s growth in North America is fueled by hundreds of thousands of new stories every day from millions of creators, creating an endless pipeline of original content for audiences around the world.
David Lee is the global chief financial officer of WEBTOON and president of Wattpad, overseeing the business strategy behind two of the largest creator-driven storytelling platforms in the world. Before joining WEBTOON, Lee served as CFO of Zynga, where he helped guide the company through major shifts in the mobile gaming market. Across his career, Lee has worked through multiple transformations in technology and entertainment, from mobile gaming to digital storytelling. He sat down to record a sponsored episode of The BIG Show, GamesBeat’s podcast.
WEBTOON and Wattpad have built global communities around creators and fandom, giving writers and artists platforms to develop stories that can grow into major entertainment properties. With millions of users searching for new content, the companies have positioned themselves as a source of original IP at a time when entertainment companies are competing for audience attention across games, film, television, and more.
For game companies, finding and growing audiences remains one of the industry’s biggest challenges. WEBTOON partnered with GamesBeat to explore how new approaches to engagement are reshaping game discovery during a talk at GamesBeat Summit.
“In gaming, oftentimes you’re talking about customer acquisition and the cost of it because you have a source of IP that you want to create fandom around,” Lee said. “You’re trying to create a destination in this competition for time across so many possible uses of it.”
For game companies, building that audience often requires significant investment in customer acquisition and finding new ways to turn players into long-term fans. WEBTOON’s model starts from a different position: a built-in audience actively searching for new stories and creators.
“What’s different about WEBTOON and Wattpad is we have this burgeoning growth [of users] who are looking for content,” he continued. “77% of our North American users at WEBTOON say they can’t find the stories they consume on our platform anywhere else. Unlike mobile gaming companies we have an evergreen source of new stories everyday.”
GamesBeat lead news writer Alex Lee’s conversation with David Lee covered his career path and how much of it followed transformations in technology, WEBTOON’s relationship with the games industry, how his role as CFO has changed depending on the organization’s goals, and the challenges facing game developers as they look for new ways to build audiences and create lasting franchises.
The discussion also explored how WEBTOON’s audience overlaps with gaming and why the company sees opportunities to connect creators, stories, and interactive entertainment.
“Our readers are gamers,” Lee said. “80% of the people who love WEBTOON are gamers. They aren’t just gamers, they pay to play games. Something like over 60% of the people on our platform pay at a rate that’s higher than average.”
To listen to the show, click on the Spotify player above — or you can click here to watch the full video if you’re a GB MAX member. More episodes of the BIG Show are coming this summer, with regular episode drops every Monday between now and early August, as well as occasional bonus episode drops like today’s episode throughout the summer.