Kakao's Piccoma conquers manga birthplace of Japan with turnover over $1 bn

[Source: Kakao Japan]

Piccoma, a dominant digital comic platform in Japan under South Korea’s Kakao Corp., has achieved $1 billion milestone in accumulated transaction turnover in just five years since it ventured into the manga birthplace.

Mobile data and analytics provider App Annie on Tuesday reported that Piccoma’s transaction turnover has passed $ 1 billion since it launched digital comics platform in April 2016, a feat extraordinary in a single market.

Kakao Japan owed the fast proliferation of manga service to novel and innovative service such as customized user interface and user experience enabling a mobile viewing environment.

It tantalized and kept readers by offering episodes instead of the entire book through so-called “wait and read with 0 yen” service.

Piccoma raised 200 yen ($1.75) in monthly sales in the starting year of 2016. It gradually increased membership through wait-for-free-view marketing for paid contents that benchmarks Kakao Page’s “wait for free content” system.

Piccoma instead removed advertisements to keep readers focused. The strategy hit the nail as sales shot up.

Transaction nearly tripled annually. Turnover jumped from 2.4 billion yen in 2017 to 6.2 billion yen in 2018, 13.4 billion yen in 2019, and 37.6 billion yen last year. Its accumulated transactions reached 60 billion yen as of last year and kept the level above 50 billion yen so far this year.

Last year, Piccoma was No. 1 in sales in non-game application sector and accounted for 65 percent of Japan’s manga platform market. It offers about 70,000 manga contents to a daily average of 4.5 million users.

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