Naver's Wattpad lays off 30 employees again

Naver Corp.'s subsidiary and North American original fiction platform, Wattpad, has once again carried out layoffs after a year. According to the webtoon industry on Tuesday, Wattpad recently laid off around 30 employees, equivalent to 15% of its total workforce.

This is the second round of layoffs since March of last year when 42 employees were let go. Wattpad, a large fan fiction company, was acquired by Naver for $600 million in 2021.
Despite hiring about 100 new employees over the past two years, the expected synergy between the North American unit of Webtoon Entertainment, the parent company of Naver Webtoon, and Wattpad has not materialized.

With the global content market experiencing a downturn since the beginning of the endemic after COVID-19, Wattpad seems to be streamlining its operations ahead of Naver Webtoon's anticipated US stock listing.

Meanwhile, Naver Webtoon is collaborating with Wattpad to advance its webtoon and web novel intellectual property (IP) adaptation into visual content.

Last year, Wattpad Webtoon Studios announced plans for a Spanish-language film, and recently, it signed an agreement with the Spanish production company Zeta Producciones, known for creating the Netflix series "Elite."

Write to Haeyoung Park at bono@hankyung.com