Kakao Entertainment is pulling the plug on Tapas. Korean outlet Money Today reported the company would notify publishers and rights holders on Tuesday about a North American shutdown, including an end date, how titles will be handled, and how settlements get paid.
Five years ago this was the big English-language land grab. In 2021 Kakao bought Tapas and webnovel platform Radish for about 1.1 trillion won, roughly US$780 million. Tapas was valued around $510 million. Radish was valued around $440 million. The two brands merged into Tapas Entertainment in 2022. Radish went dark in 2025 so Kakao could "focus" North America on Tapas. Now Tapas is going too. Direct Kakao-run webtoon and webnovel apps in North America would be over.
Tapas launched in 2012 as Comic Panda, then Tapastic, then the name everyone knows it as today. Chang Kim and Young-Jun Jang built it in the U.S. as an English home for vertical comics and original series. Kakao already had the Korean factory. Tapas was supposed to be the storefront.
The storefront never beat WEBTOON. It still carried a real catalog. ICv2 flagged titles readers actually open: Solo Leveling, Overgeared, Villains Are Destined to Die, Tomb Raider King, SSS-Class Revival Hunter. Independent hits lived there too, including Leeanne M. Krecic's Eisner-nominated Let's Play and Turtleme's The Beginning After the End. Solo Leveling also runs on Tappytoon. Print editions of several Tapas-hosted books already sit at Yen Press's Ize Press imprint, plus Inklore, Crossed Hearts, Andrews McMeel, and Vault. Those paper licenses do not automatically keep the app alive.
Kakao is shrinking the map at home as well. By the end of the year it plans to fold Kakao Webtoon into Kakao Page, stacking content, user data, and about 16,000 original IPs on one Korean platform. Taiwan's Kakao Webtoon already got a kill date last cycle. Piccoma in Japan is the overseas piece Kakao still wants to keep. Parent company Kakao is lining up a 2027 split into Kakao AI and Kakao X, with Entertainment parked on the X side. Platform sprawl is the thing getting cut.
Tapas took a ₩46 billion goodwill hit in late 2023. After Radish died, the North American story unit was one app and a lot of overhead. Creators who posted original English series used Tapas because it was the other door besides WEBTOON. That door is the one Kakao is boarding up.
Readers should assume nothing about wallets until Kakao writes it down. Radish's 2025 shutdown is the closest rehearsal: publishers got a timeline, users scrambled for downloads and leftover currency, and a lot of novels simply left the English app. Same pattern is likely. Same silence so far.
If your series only updates on Tapas, watch the publisher mail that went out Tuesday. If you paid for Ink to skip waits, screenshot your library. Print volumes and other official apps are the copies that will still exist after the URL dies. Kakao spent the better part of a billion dollars to own the English pipe. It is keeping the IP and dropping that pipeline they bet on.
Did you read on Tapas every week, or is this just another app you will replace with WEBTOON and print? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.