Tapas and Radish: Kakao Entertainment Merges Digital Platforms

Change is coming for Tapas, the digital platform for webcomics and digital prose, and radish, the digital prose serial platform. Kakao Entertainment, Korea’s leading provider of popular mobile content platforms, merged its North America subsidiaries Tapas Media and Radish Media, creating a single digital publishing platform with more than 100,000 creators telling more than 100,000 stories. Tapas is the unique platform that publishes both digital comics and serialized novels. The merger of these leading digital publishers creates a unified community of storytellers in North America.

The merger agreement was unanimously approved by Tapas Media and Radish Media’s Board of Directors, with Radish Media as the surviving company. The merger will boost Kakao Entertainment’s global growth, providing an umbrella for three existing digital storytelling platforms: Tapas, Radish, and Asian fantasy fiction platform Wuxiaworld™. Tapas Founder and CEO, Chang Kim, will serve as CEO of the new, not-yet-named company and continue as Global Strategy Officer at Kakao Entertainment. Kim provides insight into the US market while continuing to focus on developing original IP. The three platforms will complement each other under unified leadership and vision but continue to operate independently after the merger.

“I’m very excited by the challenge presented by the super competitive global entertainment market, and I know this merger positions us well with the momentum we need to solidify all our capabilities and maintain our competitive edge as a content IP powerhouse,” Kim says. “We look forward to continuing our innovative journey in storytelling and reaching new audiences with compelling stories across multiple categories.”

“The agreement will provide a major leap forward for Kakao Entertainment in the burgeoning K-content industry and offer exciting new opportunities in the North American storytelling market,” says Jinsoo Lee, CEO of Kakao Entertainment. “Tapas, Radish, and Wuxiaworld™ each bring a huge lineup of content IPs to the table, and when we put them under one banner with Kakao Entertainment’s proven ability to generate and monetize original stories, it will pave the way for unparalleled growth and generate more success stories.”

Lee added, “Kakao Entertainment is a key player in the growth of storytelling globally. With our content IP expertise and the outstanding content creation capabilities of the new company, we will accelerate our efforts to become a dominant regional and global player in the market in the next three years.”

Kakao Entertainment specializes in maximizing the lifecycle of digital stories. It first created the novel-to-comics model, which took web novels and successfully adapted them into webtoons to reach larger audiences. Past hits include Solo Leveling, A Business Proposal, and What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim? With this merger, the new company will not only continue their novel-to-comics model but also expand into Hollywood films, television shows, gaming, the metaverse, and NFTs. Radish plans to introduce audiobooks of its successful original stories, targeting North America’s fast-growing audio content market.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Tapas is a pioneer of mobile storytelling platforms in the US and has grown the mobile stories market with more than 9.5 billion pageviews of 103,000 original series, both in its webcomics and web novels. Tapas’ microtransaction-based digital currency (Ink) empowers readers to support their favorite creators and stories directly, generating revenue for creators.  Tapas saw ten times year-over-year revenue growth in 2021, averaging more than $2 million per month for creators, making it one of the top three grossing comic apps in the US.