How much money do webtoon creators earn? (2024)

As the webtoon industry continues to expand, thousands of creators are starting their own webcomics, hoping to be able to support themselves with their passion. And it’s certainly possible to make a living, or even make it big, from webtoons. The biggest webtoons have sparked Netflix TV show adaptations (like Heartstopper) and garnered book deals (like Lore Olympus).

But while the top webtoon earners make over a million dollars a year, what about the rest? How much do webtoon artists really get paid? Let’s find out.

How do webtoon artists get paid?

Before we dive into the research (and boy, is there a lot of research in this one), we should go over how webtoon artists even get paid in the first place via each platform’s payment system. We’re gonna focus on the biggest fishes in the pond, Naver/Line WEBTOON and Tapas, because webtoon artists ultimately make money because of readers, and those apps have the biggest userbases.

How does Line WEBTOON’s payment system work?

The biggest player in the game is Line WEBTOON, and they have two creator types: Canvas creators (who post their comics for free) and Originals creators (who have a contract with WEBTOON).

Canvas creators can get paid via WEBTOON’s Ad Revenue System — but this isn’t available to everyone. Before Canvas creators can get paid, they need 40,000 page views and 1000 subscribers. Once they’ve hit that threshold, they can turn on ads. The ad payout money will accrue, and Canvas creators will be able to withdraw funds once they have made at least $100 — and not before. The Ad Revenue System isn’t super consistent, as ad payouts can vary from month to month. The only way to earn a steady income from WEBTOON is to become an Originals creator.

Each Originals creator has a contract with webtoon, and they earn a set amount per episode (meaning their income relies on their production of content, and if they take a break that income disappears). However, you can’t just automatically become an Originals creator once you’ve hit a certain milestone. WEBTOON staff editors personally recruit creators, so if you want to become an Originals creator, you have to be noticeable — which means getting a lot of fans!

How does Tapas’ payment system work?

Tapas works a little differently. They do have an ad payment system, which is accessible to creators who have at least 100 subscribers. According to Tapas, 70% of ad revenue goes to creators — meaning Tapas takes a 30% cut.

Tapas also has a paygating system, which means that creators can choose to make their episodes — or entire series — only accessible to readers who pay for it. This is called their Premium system, and creators are only eligible for this once they have 300 subscribers and have published 10 episodes. Creators get 50% of this revenue.

Finally, there’s the Tipping system. Creators can get paid directly by their readers if they have at least 250 subscribers. However, Tapas creators won’t get paid until they are tipped $25 — so if they only have one person who tips them $20, creators won’t get anything at all.

How much do webtoon artists make?

Say you’ve met all the thresholds and you’re starting to get paid for your webtoon. How much do you get? This is a lot more difficult to work out because it’s private information, but enough creators have revealed how much they get paid from their webtoons, so we can start to get an idea…

How much do WEBTOON Originals creators earn?

Original creators are contracted to produce (usually) one episode a week. Thanks to differing contracts and levels of readership, each Originals creator gets a different income at the end of the day. While WEBTOON has said that its highest earner made over $9 million in one year, some creators have spoken out about how difficult it is to support themselves on the money they get from WEBTOON.

Chase Keels and Miranda Mundt — authors of WEBTOON Original LoveBot — published an open letter to WEBTOON complaining that they couldn’t make a living.

Another anonymous Originals creator posted on Reddit saying that while they made $800 a week, after paying assistants to help with the workload and having unpaid meetings with editors, they actually just made $5 an hour.

It’s also worth noting that WEBTOON’s highest earner is Korean, and the market for webtoons is different there — and potentially much more lucrative. So while the highest earners can make anything from $38,000 to $9 million a year, most Originals creators are probably scraping by on the lower end of the spectrum.

How much do WEBTOON Canvas creators earn?

Because Canvas creators can only make money from the Ad Revenue Program, they are reliant upon page views for their earnings. That means that each Canvas creator’s earnings vary wildly from each other — and these earnings are also inconsistent for each creator.

Let’s look at some examples. In this video, Canvas creator Morish*ta goes over her earnings on WEBTOON Canvas. She has 500,000 page views, 23,000 subscribers, and has published 19 episodes over one year (2020 to 2021). In her video, she says that she has made $80 from the Ad Revenue Program. Also, because creators can only collect funds once they hit $100, Morish*ta hasn’t actually collected any of her earnings.

In another video, Canvas creator TambriArt shares her earnings, month by month, over the course of two years. On her comic Fairy Lantern, she has 2.2 million page views, 25,000 subscribers, and published 83 episodes over two years (2021 to 2023). She has made $824 total.

It’s also worth mentioning that ad revenue payment is inconsistent, not only in how much you can make a month (because page views = payments and fewer people might view your page in a month), but also in the monetary worth of each page view.

In May of 2022, Tambri got $231 from 400,000 page views. That works out at $0.50 per 1,000 page views. However, she found something weird while she was going over her earnings from 2023. In April of 2023, she got $28 from 100,000 page views. That works out at $0.28 per 1,000 page views. This is clearly a different rate — and yet there’s no explanation as to why that changed.

This disparity is not unusual. Speaking in the Taddy Discord server, the author of the webtoon Love and Hex reported his own ad revenue fluctuations:

Webtoon has yet to explain why ad revenue is so inconsistent.

How much do webtoon artists make on Tapas?

Tapas is a difficult one to work out, as there’s much less data out there — fewer webtoon creators have shared how much they earn on that platform. Once again, how many webtoon readers you have determines how much money you get, so working out an average is difficult.

However, Morish*ta published another video about how much she had earned from Tapas, compared with WEBTOON. From 2014 to 2019, with 500,000 page views, Morish*ta’s webtoon made her $273. The same comic on WEBTOON made her $79 in three years (up to $80 by the time she made her next video a month later… yay!)

Publishing on the Tapas forum, other creators said they earned anything from $0 to $5 a month, while another creator said they had managed to make $90 over three years with 4,700 subscribers across three webtoon series. And it’s worth remembering that creators have to make at least $25 before they get paid.

How much do webtoon artists earn on Patreon?

Although Patreon is not a webcomics site, many creators use it to supplement their webtoon income. There, they can post bonus episodes and even NSFW content, which is available to patrons who pay a monthly fee.

Patreon allows users to create personalized tiers and earn a monthly subscriber-model income. It also allows creators to build a direct relationship with their audience, which means that if they leave a webtoon platform, they can carry their readership over to wherever they publish next. How much webtoon artists can earn on Patreon varies depending on the size of each artist’s fanbase — but it can be a very lucrative resource. Let’s look at some examples.

Red & Flynn, authors of the webtoon Shiloh, have 172,202 views on WEBTOON and 3,643 followers. On Patreon, they have 382 paid members and earn about $1,600 per month (according to Graphtreon). For a comparison point, this works out to a higher monthly earning than Tambri got via WEBTOON’s Ad Revenue Program for her comic, which had 400,000 views.

However, WEBTOON views do not translate directly to Patreon income. For example, Peter Barton has 1.2 million views on WEBTOON for A Kat's (GOD AWFUL!!!) Blessing — but on Patreon they have 40 patrons and earn $222 a month. This is much less than Red & Flynn earn on Patreon, despite the fact that Peter Barton’s webtoon has many more views on WEBTOON.

In order to get patrons, creators have to have a significant, motivated fanbase beyond their followers on WEBTOON. If we look to social media, we can see that while Red & Flynn have 55,000 followers across Instagram and Twitter, Peter Barton has only 8,000 on Twitter (and doesn’t seem to have an Instagram). This might explain the difference between the Patreon earning levels: Red & Flynn have developed a fanbase outside of one webtoon platform.

Where can you publish a webtoon to get paid directly?

Webtoon creators are reliant on subscribers and page views before they can even become eligible to get paid, which can be really frustrating. However, there are some websites that allow you to get paid directly by your readers straight away. One such site is GlobalComix, which has a credits system, and requires no minimum readership threshold before you can start making money from your comic.

The lack of revenue threshold is one of the reasons that we created Taddy Ink. We wanted to provide webtoon creators with an easy way to publish their comics to multiple apps, and get paid directly by their readers — without having to jump through any hoops, or lose their creative rights.

While it’s early days for our project, our Patreon integration is almost live! This will allow webtoon creators to get paid directly by their readers immediately, no matter how many page views they have.

With NamiComi also starting up a similar payment system soon, it’s no surprise why the landscape is shifting away from thresholds and eligibility limits. Webtoon creators deserve to get paid for their work — because whenever they publish on a content platform, their comics are already making money for someone else. Change is on the way. The future looks to be brighter and, most importantly, fairer, for webtoon creators.

Start your webtoon journey…