Naver Webtoon to launch Cuts, a short-form video, blending fan-made animation with pro IP to reshape digital storytelling.
In September 2025, Naver Webtoon is set to unveil Cuts, a bold new platform reimagining how webtoons are experienced, transitioning from static vertical-scroll comics to 1–3 minute animated shorts. With this move, Naver will introduce a hybrid model. It will combine condensed adaptations of popular webtoons with fully user-generated short animations. This move will end up empowering both professional and amateur creators to contribute and share on the platform.
The first release on Cuts is going to be “A Day in the Life of Ms. Kim Ae‑yong”, starring the feline protagonist from the hit webtoon “My Daughter Is a Zombie.” It was revealed through a special episode that also served as part of the webtoon’s movie cross-promotion. By blending original content with community-driven creations, Cuts aims to deliver bite-sized entertainment tailored to Gen Z and young Millennials, whose media consumption is increasingly centered on short-form video formats.
Webtoon Market Growth: Korea and Beyond
The global webtoons market is experiencing explosive growth. According to Mordor Intelligence, it is projected to reach approximately USD 10.85 billion in 2025. It also projects a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 34% through 2030, reaching USD 48.31 billion. Even other research companies have estimates that align closely.
Korean platforms like Naver Webtoon and Kakao Piccoma are industry leaders, ranking among the top global paid digital comic apps thanks to strong IP libraries and international expansion. South Korea remains a central hub with domestic consumer spending and global user growth showing record momentum.
The Surge in Short‑Form Video Consumption
In South Korea, short-form video platforms have become central to digital media habits. As of August 2024, Koreans spent an average of 52 hours per month on short-form apps like YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels. It is more than seven times the time spent on OTT streaming services such as Netflix or TVing.
This audio-visual shift reflects broader preferences: more than 90% of Gen Z and Millennials regularly watch short-form videos due to their quick and engaging style. Platforms like YouTube Shorts and TikTok command massive engagement, especially among younger users. In a fast-paced society like Korea’s, this type of “snack culture”—consuming bite-sized media—has become dominant, aligning with the lifestyles of digital natives.
Why Webtoon Platforms Must Pivot Now
While the consumption of long-form webtoons remains strong, growth in usage frequency has slowed, suggesting that platforms must innovate to sustain engagement. Short-form animations represent a clear opportunity to adapt, offering quicker and more accessible storytelling formats tailored to today’s user expectations.
Naver Webtoon’s introduction of Cuts, a UGC‑enabled short-form animation platform, directly addresses this shift. By combining professional adaptations with fan-created micro-animations, Cuts bridges the gap between static webtoon episodes and dynamic video experiences, making IP more versatile and shareable.
Strategic Alignment: Cuts and Naver Webtoon
Launching Cuts positions Naver Webtoon at the intersection of two rising trends: webtoons’ global expansion and short-form video’s domination of media consumption. The platform can repurpose existing IP into 1–3 minute animated shorts, enhancing visibility, discoverability, and virality.
Equally important, Cuts opens the door to community and creator participation. Through UGC, amateur and professional creators alike can build their short animations around popular characters and stories, turning passive fandom into active contribution, and driving both user engagement and brand loyalty.
Platform Features & Content Types on Naver Cuts
Diverse Formats: Recaps and Original Shorts
Naver Webtoon’s upcoming platform Cuts is designed to offer two primary content formats. The first is recap-style animations, short-form video summaries of existing webtoons. Imagine animated trailers for each episode or arc. The second, and more innovative component, is the production of original short animations through a user-generated content (UGC) model. It will allow both amateur and professional creators to submit their own 1–3-minute animated stories based on Webtoon IPs or entirely new narratives.
UGC‑Driven Creation and Contribution
Unlike earlier experiments like North America’s “New & Hot”, which offered recap videos created centrally, Cuts empowers the community with a true UGC platform. Amateur and professional creators alike can upload short animations. It can be either adaptations or original works, breaking traditional production boundaries and fueling greater participation and diversity of voices.
Animation Style & Duration
Cuts’ short-form animations are expected to run 1-3 minutes, optimized for mobile and social sharing behavior. While official recaps will follow a polished, directed style, amateur submissions may vary in aesthetic and production quality. This flexibility encourages creative experimentation and lower entry barriers.
Platform Workflow & Tools (Trademark Insight)
According to Naver’s trademark details, Cuts will likely support features such as content creation tools, uploading frameworks, forums for user interaction, and support for animated motion comics. These hints suggest the platform will offer robust SaaS-based tools to enable users to create, edit, upload, and share animated storytelling content directly within Cuts, further lowering production barriers.
First Showcase Example
The inaugural release on Cuts is an animated short titled “A Day in the Life of Ms. Kim Ae‑yong”, featuring the cat character from the hit webtoon My Daughter Is a Zombie. This example highlights how Cuts can repurpose existing IP into accessible bite-sized content, building fan engagement and cross-promotion around familiar characters.
Strategic Opportunities for Naver Webtoon’s Cuts
Amplifying IP Value via Viral Short-Form
With Cuts, Naver Webtoon can reinvigorate its existing IP portfolio, transforming popular characters and story arcs into digestible, shareable microanimations. These clips serve as both cross-promotion for longer webtoon series and standalone viral content, driving deeper brand engagement.
Empowering Creator Diversity through UGC
By positioning Cuts as a truly user-generated platform, Naver Webtoon taps into the vast creativity of its community, ranging from amateurs to seasoned creators. This model not only democratizes content creation but also increases content volume and variety without relying solely on centralized production. This approach expands the storytelling ecosystem and broadens the platform’s appeal through grassroots participation.
Enhancing Monetization and Engagement Ecosystem
Cuts offers new monetization channels beyond traditional ad or subscription models. With creator-driven submissions, Naver can explore monetization opportunities for creators, branded content, and short-form ad formats tied to specific micro-series or individual creators. Similar strategies, such as the AI-powered Character Chat feature, have demonstrated positive growth in original webtoon engagement and revenue generation.
Reinforcing Naver Webtoon’s Global Brand Position
Naver Webtoon already boasts hundreds of millions of users globally and is a recognized leader in digital storytelling. Cuts strengthens this position by merging vertical-scroll webtoon narrative with globally trending short-video formats. This evolution integrates storytelling with creator economy models, enhancing retention and strengthening Webtoon’s appeal to both creators and audiences worldwide.
Setting the Stage for Experimental Storytech Innovations
As a controlled UGC platform, Cuts provides a testbed for future storytelling experiments, including interactive shorts, animated chatbots, AI-based creator tools, crowdsourced narratives, and more. This opens a path toward accelerated integration of story tech. Here creative formats blur the lines between traditional animation, social media sharing, and interactive experiences. At the same time, it leverages the Webtoon ecosystem’s content and community foundation.
Competitive Landscape
The launch of Cuts positions Naver Webtoon directly in competition with emerging AI-powered short-form video tools like Kakao Entertainment’s Helix Shorts. Helix Shorts automatically transforms written webtoons into short videos. They are summary-style clips featuring AI-generated narration, dynamic pacing, voiceover (via TTS), background music, and editing effects. This innovation reduces production time from around three weeks and KRW 2 million to just three hours and approximately KRW 60,000 per short. It now powers approximately 40% of all short-form content on KakaoPage and is surfaced via personalized recommendation engines.
By contrast, Cuts stands out by emphasizing user-generated content, empowering creators to produce and upload animated shorts. While Helix Shorts automates production centrally through AI, Cuts prioritizes creativity and community expression. It democratizes access to animation through an inclusive creator ecosystem. This divergence in strategy marks Cuts as a platform for creative participation, rather than automated summarization.
Benefits to Users & Community
Cuts offers significant advantages to both creators and audiences:
- For Creators:
Amateur and semi-professional creators gain direct access to Naver’s IP library, enabling them to produce fan-made animations or reinterpret characters and stories in bite-sized form. This opens up possibilities for monetization, brand visibility, and creative recognition within a supportive platform. - For Users & Fans:
Fans enjoy fresh, varied stories from a diverse range of creators. Short-form animation enhances the dynamism of Webtoon IP, making it more accessible and shareable across social media platforms. - For Platform & Ecosystem:
With Cuts, Naver Webtoon can extend the reach and lifecycle of existing webtoon IP, driving engagement through viral shorts, increasing discoverability, and fostering emotional connections with audiences. Its creator-focused approach builds loyalty and deepens the community by empowering users as content contributors rather than passive consumers.
Broader Industry Implications
Elevating Webtoon Animation—”Webtoonimation” as Korea’s Next Creative Frontier
Cuts positions Naver Webtoon at the forefront of a rapidly emerging field: webtoonimation, the transformation of vertical-scroll comics into animated storytelling formats. Korean animation has traditionally shied away from young adult webtoon-based narratives. But, recent efforts to adapt series like Lookism, The Boxer, and True Beauty illustrate significant momentum in this space.
Cuts accelerates this trajectory by democratizing access, allowing not just studios, but community creators to animate with familiar IP.
Expanding the Ecosystem: Storytech Meets Creator Economy
As part of Korea’s broader push to make webtoons a global strategic content industry, Cuts aligns with government-led initiatives under the 2024–25 Content Industry Master Plan. These emphasize localized storytelling, translation support, and IP export expansion.
Webtoon blends user-made animation with professional IP to create fresh storytelling experiences. At this storytech frontier, storytelling, technology, and community converge to shape digital content’s future.
Reinforcing Korea’s Creative Export Strategy
Webtoons now make up a core pillar of the Korean Wave, transcending borders into dramas, films, merchandise, and global licensing deals. Cuts expands this export capacity by enabling rapid, shareable short-form animations to tap scalable virality globally.
Innovation for Amateur Creators: Lowering Barriers to Entry
Historically, motion-comic creation has required specialized skills and workflows. Emerging academic tools like DancingBoard suggest that streamlined interfaces can dramatically reduce creation effort and costs.
Cuts may usher in a similar paradigm shift by offering creators SaaS tools for animation, editing, and sharing. It will bridge the gap between professional studios and individual storytellers.
Feeding the Global Content Pipeline
With webtoons already serving as the creative engine behind multiple hit adaptations on Netflix and other streaming platforms, new content from Cuts can feed further production pipelines. User-generated shorts can spotlight underrated characters or expand story concepts, surface-testing ideas that might evolve into full series or drama adaptations. This incremental pipeline approach complements the traditional IP development strategy.
Key Takeaways
1. Naver Cuts Turns Webtoons into Bite-Sized Animations
Imagine your favorite webtoons in animated form, just 1 to 3 minutes long. That’s what Cuts does: it transforms scroll-based comics into short, shareable animations tailored to Gen Z and Millennials who are all about Reels and Shorts.
2. Creators—This One’s for You
Rather than relying on AI alone, Cuts is inviting real creators, both hobbyists and pros, to submit their own shorts. No more gatekeeping! It’s a genuine UGC platform where fans can bring beloved characters to life or create original stories around them.
3. It’s More Than a Video Hub—It’s a Creator Ecosystem
Trademark filings suggest Cuts will include creation tools, editing interfaces, forums, and sharing features, so it’s not just about watching videos. It’s an entire ecosystem where creators can ideate, collaborate, and publish, all in one place.
4. Smarter Competition than AI-Only Tools
Platforms like Kakao’s Helix Shorts lean heavily on AI to automatically generate video summaries. Cuts takes a different path: it puts the human creator first, giving agency to storytellers instead of relying purely on automation.
5. New Ways to Monetize
With creators bringing in diverse content and fans watching/share animations, Naver opens revenue avenues beyond ads, think branded shorts, creator rewards, micro-licensing of IP, or ad-integrated shorts. It’s a richer monetization playground.
6. A Sandbox for Storytech Experiments
Cuts isn’t just a platform—it’s a playground. It lays the groundwork for interactive shorts, AI-assisted creation tools, crowd-sourced narratives, and more. In other words—Naver is building toward the next-level of storytelling tech.
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