WEBTOON's Dual-Hat CFO Explains How Creator Payments Built a Billion-Dollar Digital Comics Empire
The finance chief of WEBTOON Entertainment has a unusual job description: he's both CFO and COO of a platform that's turned webcomics into a global phenomenon by paying creators directly—and he's betting that model can scale further even as investor scrutiny of creator economy businesses intensifies.
David Lee holds both the chief financial officer and chief operating officer titles at WEBTOON Entertainment, the digital comics platform that's built what the company calls a "billion-dollar fandom" around serialized storytelling. In a recent interview, Lee outlined how the company's creator payment infrastructure became central to both its operational model and financial strategy—a structure that puts unusual demands on a finance organization more accustomed to traditional revenue recognition than managing millions in creator payouts.
The dual role is telling. At most media companies, the CFO worries about the P&L while the COO handles creator relationships and content operations. At WEBTOON, Lee's argument is that you can't separate the two: the economics of creator payments ARE the operations, and the operations drive the financial model. It's a structure that reflects how creator economy platforms have scrambled traditional media finance, forcing CFOs to think less like their counterparts at Netflix (which pays for content upfront) and more like marketplace operators managing two-sided transaction flows.
WEBTOON's model centers on what Lee describes as a creator economy playbook—the platform pays creators based on engagement and monetization of their serialized comics, which readers consume in vertical-scrolling format optimized for mobile devices. The company has built fandom not just around individual titles but around the WEBTOON platform itself, with readers following creators across series and participating in comment sections that can run thousands of messages per episode.
For Lee's finance team, that means building systems to track and pay out creator earnings across multiple revenue streams: ad revenue sharing, in-app purchases of virtual currency used to unlock episodes early, and increasingly, IP licensing deals when WEBTOON comics get adapted into TV shows or films. It's a payment infrastructure challenge that looks more like Uber or DoorDash than traditional publishing—except the "drivers" are artists and writers, and the "rides" are serialized story episodes that can run for years.
The billion-dollar fandom reference points to WEBTOON's valuation ambitions, though Lee didn't disclose specific figures in the interview. What he did emphasize was how the creator payment model creates a different kind of financial planning challenge: unlike subscription businesses with predictable recurring revenue, or ad-supported media with seasonal patterns, WEBTOON's finances move with hit-driven content cycles. A breakout series can spike engagement and revenue quickly, but it also triggers corresponding creator payouts that the finance team needs to model and manage.
The operational side of Lee's role involves the content pipeline itself—how many creators the platform can support, how to identify emerging hits, when to invest in marketing specific series. These are traditionally COO decisions, but Lee's point is that they're inseparable from capital allocation choices. Investing in creator tools or discovery algorithms isn't just a product decision; it's a financial bet on whether better creator support drives enough incremental revenue to justify the spend.
What Lee's dual mandate really signals is how creator economy businesses are forcing finance leaders to get closer to the operational levers than traditional CFO roles required. You can't build a financial model for a creator platform without understanding creator behavior, content consumption patterns, and community dynamics. The spreadsheet and the product roadmap have to inform each other.
The question for WEBTOON—and for Lee—is whether this model can maintain its economics as the platform scales and competition for creator attention intensifies. Other platforms have discovered that creator payments can become a race to the bottom, with platforms bidding up rates to attract talent while struggling to monetize audiences enough to cover the payouts. Lee's bet is that WEBTOON's fandom model, where readers are loyal to the platform itself and not just individual creators, gives the company more leverage in that equation.
For CFOs watching the creator economy space, WEBTOON's structure offers a case study in what happens when your biggest cost center is also your product development engine. Lee isn't just managing a P&L; he's managing a marketplace where every financial decision affects creator behavior, and every operational choice has immediate financial implications. Whether that's a blueprint or a warning probably depends on how comfortable you are with your CFO also running operations.
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