Naver Webtoon Says Paying Readers Returned After NewToki Shut Down

Naver Webtoon says readers came back to paid webtoons after NewToki, widely described as South Korea's largest illegal webtoon site, closed in April. In its latest Toon Radar report, the company says new purchases of the series hit hardest by piracy jumped 7.9 times in the week the site went offline.

The figures come from Naver's own sales data and cover a selected group of titles. Still, they offer a look at what can happen to legal sales when a major pirate site disappears.

What Naver measured

Naver Webtoon analyzed purchase data from January to August 2026, according to its September 30 press release. It split titles into three groups: series whose newest episode used to appear on pirate sites on the day of official release, series that leaked a day or more later, and a control group of titles that did not leak.

For the first group, new purchases in the week NewToki closed were 7.9 times the average of the three weeks before. Naver says 96% of those buyers had already been reading the same series, which it sees as readers returning from the pirate site.

Revenue for that group rose 29.7% in the three weeks after the closure and another 11.9% in the three weeks after that, the company says.

Naver did not publish the results for the other two groups, and the release does not say what the revenue increases were measured against. Titles that were on hiatus or released irregularly were left out of the sample.

Naver Webtoon vice president Kim Gyu-nam said the data confirmed that preventing leaks and the government's closure of illegal sites helped bring readers back to the official service and keep them there.

Toon Radar

Toon Radar is Naver's own anti-piracy system, which it has used since 2017. It adds hard-to-see watermarks to episodes so the company can trace the account that first leaked them.

Naver says the system now protects 99.8% of its newest paid episodes from illegal distribution and pushes the timing of leaks on pirate sites back by three to five episodes. In an earlier report in April, it said average revenue for ten major series was 23% higher in weeks when a new paid episode did not leak within 24 hours.

The company also says it helped close three Vietnam-based pirate sites with South Korea's culture ministry, and three English-language sites with about 130 million annual visits in an operation with Interpol and police in North Africa. Vietnam has become a focus for rightsholders this year, with Japanese companies backing what CODA calls the first criminal case there over Japanese content.

NewToki closed before the blocks began

NewToki announced its closure on April 27, together with its sister sites Manatoki, which carried Japanese manga, and Booktoki, a web novel site. The notice said none of the three would return and that user data would be deleted, Anime News Network reported.

Two weeks later, on May 11, South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism started using a new emergency blocking power under the amended Copyright Act. NewToki was among the first 34 sites it ordered internet providers to block, according to Kyunghyang Shinmun.

Copycat and new pirate sites appeared after NewToki closed, Naver acknowledges. Citing the Korea Copyright Protection Agency, it says average daily visits to the three most visited illegal sites fell about 64% after the blocking began, from about 4.71 million to 1.71 million.

Manatoki suspect extradited from Japan

Police have also gone after the man suspected of running Manatoki. The 37-year-old left South Korea for Japan in 2017 and became a Japanese citizen in 2022. He was extradited on June 11, the first time Japan has handed over one of its own nationals to South Korea under the two countries' 2002 extradition treaty, Korean media reported citing the Ministry of Justice and the culture ministry.

Gyeongbuk Provincial Police sent him to prosecutors in custody in late June. He is accused of buying e-books of Japanese manga, translating them into Korean and posting more than 1,400 works on Manatoki between March 2019 and July 2021, while earning money from gambling ads on the site, Seoul Shinmun reported. The Korea Herald reported that he faces charges of copyright infringement and promoting illegal gambling.

Police say they also suspect him of running NewToki and Booktoki, but Japan approved his extradition only for the Manatoki charges. Under the treaty, South Korea needs Japan's consent to prosecute him for anything else. The culture ministry said it was taking the steps needed to widen the investigation, Incheon Ilbo reported in July. No indictment has been reported so far.