The Nasdaq-listed company said Monday that it had tested the initiative on four original Korean titles — including "Childhood Friend Complex" — that are serialized in English, French, Thai and Indonesian.
By aligning global release dates with the Korean-language service for series returning from hiatuses of five months to a year, the platform eliminated translation delays that had long left overseas readers reliant on pirate sites for the latest chapters.
The results showed that "Childhood Friend Complex" recorded the sharpest surge at about 208 percent in global payment revenue compared to its eight-week pre-hiatus average, other top webtoons following the spike as well.
Weekly readership also climbed across all four titles, with "Lee Seop's Romance" posting the highest gain at 82 percent.
The company attributed the gains largely to the absorption of paying users who had previously turned to unlicensed translation sites during the gap between Korean and global publication. Titles typically struggle to recover pre-hiatus readership and revenue levels after prolonged breaks, making the immediate rebound all the more notable.
"Simultaneous releases demand close collaboration between creators and the platform," Kim Yong-soo, president of Webtoon Entertainment, said. "We will build a fast, efficient translation support system to minimize the burden on creators while working to protect the revenue that has been siphoned off by illegal sites."
The simultaneous release strategy operates in tandem with Webtoon Entertainment's proprietary anti-piracy technology, Toon Radar, which uses artificial intelligence to embed invisible identifiers in webtoon images and track unauthorized distribution.
The company said the number of titles illegally copied on the day of their official release fell by about 80 percent as of November compared to the average for the first three quarters of the year.
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