Naver Webtoon said on the 18th that after using Toon Radar, its in-house technology to block illegal webtoon distribution, the number of titles copied to illegal sites on the same day their latest episodes were posted fell by about 80%.
Naver Webtoon introduced these results in the report published that day, "2025 Toon Radar report: the effect of proactive blocking technology responses."
Since July 2017, Toon Radar has been used to track illegal copies of Naver Webtoon's content at home and abroad, predict suspicious users, and block them in advance. To respond quickly and efficiently to rapidly evolving webtoon piracy methods, it incorporated artificial intelligence (AI) from the early days and has continued to advance the related technology.
A Naver Webtoon official said, "In particular this year, by focusing on advancing technologies such as stolen account crackdown, manipulated automated access detection, and abnormal behavior pattern detection, we raised the difficulty of piracy and leaks and achieved results in delaying the timing of leaks."
According to the report, on Naver Webtoon's Korean-language platform, the average number of lending paid episodes per account attempting illegal leakage fell to one-tenth. This means the account expense that operators of illegal sites must expend to secure content has increased more than tenfold. The fewer webtoon episodes that can be stolen per account, the more it raises the difficulty of illegal content copying.
For the top 50 popular domestic titles, which leak relatively quickly and cause significant sales damage, the gap in episode count between the latest episode posted on illegal sites and the latest episode available on the official platform widened by about three times at year-end compared with the start of the year. Because the latest paid episodes are converted to free on the official platform after a certain period, delaying the time until they are leaked to illegal sites as much as possible helps protect creators' revenue.
The number of titles copied to illegal sites immediately on the same day the latest episode was posted on the official platform fell by about 80% in November compared with the average for the first through third quarters this year.
A Naver Webtoon official said, "We assess that strengthening Toon Radar's proactive blocking indirectly affected the decline in traffic visiting illegal sites." According to tallies by data analysis platform Similarweb, the monthly average visit traffic of the largest illegal webtoon site in Korea since September this year fell by about 33% compared with the first-half average.
Naver Webtoon has a dedicated Toon Radar research and development team under its AI organization and, in coordination with its dedicated "Anti-Piracy" unit responding to illegal webtoons, is responding on multiple fronts to eradicate illegal webtoon distribution.