Kakao Entertainment to Shut Down Tapas, Five Years After Acquisition

The landscape for official, legal English platforms for webcomics and webnovels is looking incredibly grim.

According to Maeil Business and BigGo! Finance, Kakao Entertainment will be consolidating its two platforms, KakaoPage and Kakao Webtoon into one, and shutting down Tapas, the platform they acquired back in 2021 along with Radish for $510 million and around $400 million, respectively, for approximately a billion. Users’ purchases and histories from Kakao Webtoon will be moved to KakaoPage and details about the transfer will be announced at a later date. Staff and creators were not notified in advance.

Before it was Kakao Webtoon, it was Daum Webtoon, but then the platform, which launched in 2003 and made it the first webtoon portal in the world, was merged with Kakao in 2014. Years later in 2021, Daum Webtoon was rebranded to Kakao Webtoon. While at first glance, KakaoPage and Kakao Webtoon appear to do the same thing, they both host different content.

Tapas, which began as a small start-up company in 2012, received significant funding from Daum Kakao and was skyrocketing as a platform for where creators could showcase their original work (TurtleMe’s Beginning After the End being one such example of a success story) and where readers could have one place to read all their favorite webcomics. The platform amassed billions of views.

A year after its acquisition, Tapas, Radish, and Wuxiaworld–a platform focused on wuxia novels from China and Korea–were merged into one umbrella called Tapas Entertainment.

In 2023, Kakao, in its financial reports, recognized a goodwill impairment (an accounting term when the market value of a company’s assets drops below its book value) of 460 billion won for Tapas, and cited difficulties in the North American market.

Then things began shutting down.

In that same year, Kakao Entertainment shut down Tapas Entertainment’s Korean office and said it was to “improve business efficiency and competitiveness.” In 2024 and 2025 the company ended its webtoon services in Indonesia and Taiwan, respectively. In December 2025, Radish closed down. The only remaining service is Piccoma which operates in Japan.

A date for the termination of services for Tapas was not yet announced as of this article’s writing but it’s likely to be sometime this year as Kakao Entertainment plans to integrate services by the end of 2026.

The reason for merging Kakao Webtoon into KakaoPage is, according to Chosun, “to maximize the efficiency of the content business” and the closure of Tapas is based on a strategy focused on “profitability and efficiency.” What this integration means, is a focus on “enhancing the content, user data, AI technology, and operational capabilities.” Kakao Entertainment intends to use an AI-based content recommendation system.

Meanwhile, in the midst of Kakao Entertainment’s shutdown of its North American service, the company has announced plans to split into Kakao AI and Kakao X. According to the chart on Biggo Finance, KakaoTalk-centered business will fall under Kakao AI while Kakao Entertainment, SM Entertainment, and Piccoma will fall under Kakao X.

Tapas has not issued an official notice. Information and schedule about the integration of Kakao Entertainment and KakaoPage will be announced on September 29.

Source: Maeil Business and BigGo! Finance