WEBTOON Is Bigger Than Monopoly Go: Inside a New Game Marketing Channel
Marketers are struggling to find new channels. WEBTOON's Christine Yoo and Square Enix's Melanie Gordon explain why a comics app belongs on the list: 156.9M readers, 69% of them gamers, and a product already driving 10K verified Steam wishlist adds a week.
Listen to DoF's Jen Donahoe's full conversation with Christine Yoo and Melanie Gordon.
Marketers everywhere are running into the same wall. UA is saturated, and the industry keeps circling the same 2 questions: where do you find a new channel, and where do you actually find people anymore.
WEBTOON is a good answer, and almost nobody in games is talking about it. It reaches mobile, PC, and console all at once, and Square Enix, Blizzard, and Krafton have all quietly been working with it already. Christine Yoo, Director of Brand Partnerships at WEBTOON, sells these programs to publishers. Melanie Gordon, a Senior Marketing Manager at Square Enix, has run 2 campaigns with WEBTOON, on Visions of Mana and Dragon Quest VII Reimagined. Here is what marketers should take from what they built.
Takeaway 1: WEBTOON already has the gaming audience marketers are chasing
WEBTOON has 156.9M monthly readers globally, and 69% of them play games, across mobile, console, and PC. That is roughly 108M readers who are also gamers, sitting inside a platform most game marketers have never targeted directly.
Source: Sensor Tower, Tier 1 West MAU July 2026
The scale holds up against channels marketers already buy. In Tier 1 Western markets, where most game marketing budgets actually get spent, WEBTOON's mobile app reached 21.2M readers as of Jul 2026, more than Paramount+, Candy Crush, or Monopoly Go!. Line it up against mobile games specifically and it ranks 9th in the West.
Engagement backs up the size. Readers spend about 30 minutes a day in the app, putting WEBTOON's time on platform between Snap and Facebook. A gaming audience this large, engaging at a rate that matches the social platforms marketers already buy, is the combination that makes this channel worth a serious look.
That scale makes this a gaming audience that happens to arrive through comics.
Takeaway 2: The audience is Western, and the usual assumptions are wrong
It would be easy to write this off as an Eastern platform for an Eastern audience. The revenue data supports that at first glance, Korea and Japan carried $93.5M and $136M in paid content last quarter against $34.5M for the rest of the world. But the West is where the readers and the ad inventory actually are. WEBTOON has been in the US for more than 10 years, more than 75% of its North American users are Gen Z, and about 90% are under 34.
Two more assumptions do not survive the data. The gender split is 60% female and 40% male, and Christine's line undercuts the obvious read:
"We have about 60% female and 40% male audience. Because most of our very popular titles started as romance titles, we saw more of a female audience. But what's surprising is, you see a more female audience, but they're all still gamers." — Christine Yoo
The genre mix is not just anime and JRPG either. Christine's team found first person shooters, battle royale, simulation, open world, horror, and survival among readers, which is why Blizzard's Overwatch: Undivided, a 40-episode branded series, pulled 2.4M unique views and more than 2K comments.
Whatever assumption a marketer holds about who reads WEBTOON and what they play, the data probably contradicts it.
Takeaway 3: The format performs like paid media
Square Enix ran 2 campaigns on WEBTOON, and both beat the numbers a media plan is actually judged on. Visions of Mana ran as a branded epilogue, a spin-off in the space after a chapter's last panel, built around a character shared between the comic and the game. It generated 6.3M impressions, a 124% page view lift, and click-through 184% above benchmark. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined used Tabletop, 4-panel mini adventures matched to the game's handcrafted art style. On both campaigns, Mel's cost per click beat Square Enix's own awareness benchmarks.
Part of why these read as authentic instead of sponsored is supply-side, not just reader-side. The creators building these collabs are already players. Christine's team pitches a title and gets a fan's reaction back:
"When we reach out with a title, it's like, hey, we have Square Enix, we have a Dragon Quest VII that's coming out, and they're like, oh my god, I want to do it. I'm so excited, I'm a fan. We love that reaction, because the more the creators are engaged, the more they bring added value. They're the ones who know best, their own story and the game." — Christine Yoo, describing creator response
That overlap is also why the creative does not have to stay locked on the platform. Square Enix reused the Dragon Quest VII creator's work on Instagram and saw a 91% lift on its own page, a second source of UA beyond whatever the placement itself delivered.
It's done so well that we are like, when can we partner next?" — Melanie Gordan
This channel performs like paid media, and the reason runs through both sides of the transaction, the readers and the creators.
Takeaway 4: It is faster to execute than the usual objection assumes
Marketers skip custom content because they assume it eats the calendar. It does not, at least not here. A branded epilogue, the Square Enix format, takes 1 to 1.5 months. A branded webtoon, 4 to 8 original episodes from a single creator, runs 3 to 4 months. The heaviest option, a site-wide UGC contest, takes 3 to 5 months, and the one WEBTOON ran with Capcom for Monster Hunter Wilds still produced 165 original webcomics, 200M impressions, and a 14% intent-to-play lift.
Mel's 2 campaigns bracket the range. Visions of Mana, with fewer approvals required, closed in about 1.5 months. Dragon Quest, with more internal sign-off, took 3 to 4 months, and Square Enix simply gave WEBTOON 3 scenarios and let the creator pick.
1.5 months is faster than most creative marketers are already commissioning elsewhere.
Takeaway 5: There is a real bottom-of-funnel product, priced like performance media
Everything above is upper funnel. WEBTOON's answer to the conversion question is Coin Quest, an offer wall readers see as Coin Hunter. A reader taps a campaign, adds the game to their Steam wishlist, verifies it, and gets coins. It runs at roughly 10K verified Steam wishlist adds a week, priced as true CPA, meaning a brand pays only for the verified add.
The mechanic holds up because the cancellation rate stays low. WEBTOON's client materials put it under 10%, since a wishlist add does not trigger the notification loop a typical rewarded install does. Amazing Seasun Games ran the same format for MechaBreak across 5 markets for more than 30K wishlist adds.
WEBTOON prices a product for both ends of the funnel, brand at the top and performance at the bottom.
MY TAKEAWAY
WEBTOON sells a full-funnel suite of advertising options. Branded epilogues and branded webtoons build fandom at the top of the funnel. Coin Quest prices a verified Steam wishlist add like performance media at the bottom. Both Square Enix campaigns beat their own awareness benchmarks while doing something traditional performance marketing was never built to do, putting a game inside a story its audience already loves.
UA is saturated, and the hardest part of any launch right now is finding new audience that actually overlaps with your IP. WEBTOON already has that overlap at scale, 69% of its readers play games, which makes this one of the channels worth a real look on your next media plan.
It is also worth a look for reasons unrelated to buying media. A platform with 27M creators publishing 124K episodes a day is a real source of new themes, stories, and collaborators. If your game needs its next crossover, its next creative idea, or a creator who already knows the audience, WEBTOON is a place to start looking.
