From web novel to webtoon to drama: Korea's adaptation relay, and how many stories take it
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In Korea, some successful web novels get told again, most often as a webtoon first, then as a drama, an animation, a film or a game. The relay is real, and it is the exception rather than the rule: in the survey this page draws on, one web-novel creator in four had signed a contract to adapt a work.
The starting point is 웹소설, the web novel, published in regular short episodes called 회차, which can be rented one by one, and also sold as complete volumes and e-books, which bring in the larger share of revenue, 55.1 percent.
It's read across a handful of major platforms, among them KakaoPage, Naver Series, Munpia and Joara, each competing for the same readers and the same pool of stories worth adapting further.
A survey by Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism together with KPIPA, published in April 2025 and based on online responses from 162 companies (152 content providers and 10 platforms), 800 creators and 811 readers, gives the leading genres: among creators, the most-written are contemporary romance (43.3 percent) and Western-style romance fantasy (40.0 percent); readers most often read modern fantasy (29.1 percent) and contemporary romance (28.5 percent).
The same survey found that 79 percent of readers pay for what they read; paying readers top up an average of 8,032 won at a time, credit that lasts them about 26 days across several titles, while a single episode rents for 100 to 300 won.
What happens next to a successful web novel is where the format really shows its hand.
Korean press, including the Korea Times and the Korea Herald, has documented for years a well-worn relay: a web novel that finds an audience gets adapted into a webtoon, the vertically scrolling comic format Korea effectively pioneered, and a webtoon that finds its own audience gets adapted again into a live-action or animated drama.
The industry around webtoons is substantial enough to warrant its own annual accounting: KOCCA, the Korea Creative Content Agency, published its 2024 Webtoon Industry White Paper on January 15, 2025, documenting a sector organized around exactly this kind of intellectual-property relay rather than around any single format standing alone.
What makes this worth pausing on is less the existence of adaptation, which happens everywhere books get made into films, and more the order of the formats.
In most publishing markets, a novel is judged as a novel first, and adaptation, if it comes, arrives years later as a separate, later decision made by an entirely different set of people.
In the Korean relay, the text comes first and the costlier formats follow it: a web novel that has found its readers is what gets a webtoon, and a webtoon that has found its own is what gets a drama.
None of the sources reviewed here count how many web novels make the full three-format journey. The survey does count the first step: 25.5 percent of the 800 creators had signed at least one adaptation contract, for a webtoon, a film, a drama, an animation or a game, and secondary rights were 7.2 percent of the companies' web-novel revenue. The full relay is a minority of what gets published, the same way most novels anywhere never get optioned for film.
What the relay changes, for the stories that take it, is the status of the format at the bottom of it: the web novel is the version that came first, not necessarily the last.
For three creators in four, by the survey's count, no such contract exists, and the web novel is the whole of the story, sold by the episode or as a complete book.