WEBTOON CFO David Lee Maps Creator Economy Finance Model Behind Digital Comics Platform

The CFO of WEBTOON Entertainment is navigating an unusual challenge for a finance chief: building financial infrastructure around a business model where the company doesn't own its primary assets—the stories themselves.

David Lee, who serves as both CFO and COO of the digital comics platform, discussed the company's approach to financing what he calls a "billion-dollar fandom" during a recent interview with CFO Leadership Council. The conversation centered on how WEBTOON structures its creator economy, where independent artists publish serialized comics that attract massive global audiences without traditional publishing gatekeepers.

WEBTOON operates as a platform business, which creates distinct financial planning complexities compared to traditional media companies. The platform hosts user-generated content from creators worldwide, who retain ownership of their intellectual property while WEBTOON provides distribution, monetization tools, and audience development. This means the company's value proposition—and its financial model—depends entirely on maintaining a healthy ecosystem of creators and readers rather than building a library of owned content.

For Lee, this structure requires rethinking standard media finance metrics. Traditional entertainment CFOs focus on content acquisition costs, licensing revenue, and owned IP valuation. WEBTOON's model instead demands tracking creator retention rates, audience engagement per series, and the conversion of free readers to paying subscribers—metrics more common in social platforms than publishing houses.

The "billion-dollar fandom" reference points to WEBTOON's strategy of building dedicated communities around individual series and creators. Unlike traditional comics or manga publishers that own characters and storylines outright, WEBTOON's financial success depends on its ability to attract creators, give them tools to build audiences, and then monetize those audiences through a mix of advertising, premium subscriptions, and merchandise partnerships.

This creator-centric approach also shapes how Lee approaches capital allocation. Investment decisions must balance platform infrastructure spending—the technology that helps creators publish and readers discover content—against creator support programs that keep top talent on the platform. It's a balancing act familiar to CFOs at YouTube or Spotify, but relatively novel in the comics industry.

The platform model also creates interesting financial reporting questions. How does a CFO value a platform's network effects when the content driving those effects is owned by third parties? What's the appropriate way to forecast revenue when your product catalog is determined by independent creators' publishing schedules rather than internal editorial calendars?

Lee's dual role as CFO and COO suggests WEBTOON sees these questions as operational as much as financial. The company appears to be betting that the CFO function in creator economy businesses needs to be deeply integrated with platform operations—understanding not just the numbers, but the creator behaviors and audience dynamics that generate them.

For finance leaders watching the creator economy's growth, WEBTOON's approach offers a case study in how financial planning evolves when your business model is built on other people's IP. The question isn't whether the model works—WEBTOON's scale suggests it does—but whether traditional finance frameworks adequately capture the value and risks in platform businesses where the assets walk out the door every night.