Naver Webtoon tries to enter 2 European markets

Naver Webtoon is heading to Europe after hitting 10 million monthly average users in the United States last month.

The portal site announced Monday that it started offering Naver Webtoons in Spanish and French since Thursday.

The service, an online platform for serially published comic strips, was previously made available in English, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian and Chinese.

Naver Webtoon encourages artists in the target markets to upload their work to the platform. But to start off, the company said it translated 40 works that are popular in other markets, including Korea and the United States.

Naver hopes the success in Spanish and French can expand their reach to places other than Spain and France.

An immediate expansion possibility for Spanish webtoons, for example, might be some Latin America markets.

“The plan is to extend the boundaries of webtoons as digital content to a worldwide stage - from Korea to the United States and Asia; and now to Europe,” said Naver Webtoon CEO Kim Joon-ku.

By Song Kyoung-so