Kakao Entertainment plans to shut down Tapas, the North American webtoon and webnovel platform it has operated since acquiring it in 2021. The company began notifying publishers and rights holders on Tuesday, Korean outlet Money Today reported, with the service’s end date, content management and settlement terms to be detailed to those partners.
What that means for readers is still unclear. Kakao Entertainment has not announced how it will handle user refunds, and it has not said what will happen to the content and personal data currently held on the platform. No public shutdown date has been given.
A five-year North American push ends
The decision closes out a strategy that began in 2021, when Kakao Entertainment acquired Tapas and the webnovel platform Radish for a combined investment of about 1.1 trillion won, or roughly US$780 million at the time. Tapas was valued at around US$510 million and Radish at about US$440 million in that deal. The two businesses were merged into a single entity, Tapas Entertainment, in 2022.
Tapas itself dates back further. The service launched in 2012, originally under the name Comic Panda and later Tapastic, and grew into one of the main English-language homes for webtoons and serialized webnovels.
Kakao shut Radish down in 2025, saying at the time that it would concentrate its North American storytelling business on Tapas. Shutting Tapas as well would effectively end Kakao Entertainment’s direct operation of webtoon and webnovel platforms in the region.
Consolidation in Korea, too
The pullback is not limited to North America. In South Korea, Kakao Entertainment plans to fold its two webtoon services, Kakao Page and Kakao Webtoon, into a single platform built around Kakao Page before the end of the year. That consolidation is intended to bring together the content, user data and roughly 16,000 original IPs held across both services.
Read together, the two moves point to a company narrowing its platform footprint and concentrating its catalogue in fewer places rather than running parallel services across markets.
Creators are left waiting
For the creators who publish on Tapas, the announcement arrived without answers. TurtleMe, whose The Beginning After the End comic and Soul Forged novel are both produced and published on the platform, addressed the news in a series of posts on September 23, describing Tapas as his home for the past eight years.
“I’m still trying to understand what exactly is going on, but suffice to say, I’m still in shock,” he wrote. He added that he does not yet know what comes next and that he is working to determine the situation with the platform. Despite the uncertainty, he said he intends to do everything he can to keep his series going, and noted that many other Tapas creators are in the same position.
Why it matters
Tapas has been a distribution home for a large number of series, from licensed Korean titles to original creator-owned comics, and its closure reshapes where a chunk of the English-language webtoon audience reads. A shutdown announced without published end dates, settlement details or data-handling rules leaves both readers and creators planning around unknowns, and it puts the long-term visibility of platform-exclusive series in question.
It also removes a major buyer from the North American digital comics market at a moment when competition for licensed webtoon content is intense. Kakao has said it will contact rights holders directly; until those terms are public, the practical impact on any individual series remains unconfirmed.
The news also contrasts sharply with how WEBTOON Entertainment is approaching the same audience. Days before the Tapas shutdown emerged, WEBTOON launched its first Global Drop with The Warrior’s Ballad, releasing the series in nine languages at once. One platform is narrowing its footprint while the other is pushing into more markets simultaneously.
Sources: Anime News Network (citing Kakao Entertainment, Money Today and YNA) and Anime Corner (TurtleMe’s statement)
Related: Crunchyroll has confirmed a same-day English dub for the Overgeared anime, whose webtoon was one of the titles carried on Tapas.
Featured image: Kakao Entertainment logo, via Kakao Entertainment.
