본 연구는 연재 방식으로 제공되는 웹소설 콘텐츠의 성과 결정요인에 관한 연구이다. 한국콘텐츠진흥원에 따르면 웹소설을 포함한 전자책 시장은 4,000억원 규모로 성장하였으며, 매출액 증가율 또한 2017년 전년대비 50%, 2018년 전년대비 30%를 기록하여 시장규모가 급성장하고 있다. 하지만 자료수집의 어려움에 따라, 현재 웹소설 시장을 선도하고 있는 연재형 콘텐츠들의 매출액 결정에 대한 경영학 분야에서의 계량적인 연구는 부재한 상황이다. 특히 연재형 콘텐츠들의 경우 전적으로 무료체험을 통해 유료구매를 유도해야 하는데, 효과적인 유료화 전환을 위해 작가와 플랫폼이 고려해야 할 요인들에 대한 연구가 필요하다. 본 연구에서는 연재형 콘텐츠와 전통적인 출판시장의 차이점에 주목하여, 무료연재의 시장반응, 플랫폼과 출판사의 역할, 작가의 역량과 독자와의 소통이라는 측면에서 연재형 콘텐츠의 매출액과 유료전환율의 결정요인을 실증하였다. 실증분석 결과, 연재형 콘텐츠의 매출액 및 유료전환율은 무료연재에서의 시장반응과 작가의 직전작품에 대한 선호작품 등록수, 누적된 등록수 등 시장에서의 작가에 대한 고정독자층 형성유무에 대해 통계적으로 유의미한 긍정적인 영향을 받는 것으로 나타났다. 반면 출판사(에이전시)의 유무, 직전 작품과의 유사성, 이전의 연재경험의 유무 등은 상대적으로 유의미한 영향을 주지 못하는 것으로 나타났다. 본 연구는 고객과의 지속적이고 활발한 의사소통과 시장반응에 대한 빠른 피드백의 필요성을 강조하는 최근의 경영학 트렌드에 부합하는 결과로서, 추후 디지털 콘텐츠 기업의 경영성과에 관한 연구에 대해서 시사점이 있을 것으로 기대한다.
We investigate the determinants of performance of digital content provided in serial format. According to the Korea digital content market, including web novels, has grown to 400 billion won, and the sales growth rate is also growing at a rate of 50% in 2017. However, due to the difficulties in collecting data, there is no quantitative research in the business perspective to determine the sales of serial contents leading the current web novel market. In this study, we focus on the difference between the serial content and the traditional book market. In this paper, we propose a method to analyze the sales of serialized contents and the rate of fee - based conversion in four aspects of market response, author-reader communication, authors ability, and role of web novel platform. As a result of the empirical analysis, the revenue and the conversion rate of the serialized contents were found to be positively influenced statistically significantly on the preference of the market and the market reaction in the free section, such as the number of preference works of the previous works, cumulative number of preference. On the other hand, the presence of the publisher (agency), the similarity with the previous work, and the presence or absence of the serial experience were not significant. This study is expected to have implications for future research on the management performance of digital content companies as a result of recent management trends represented by continuous and active communication with customers and quick feedback on market response. This study focuses on the determinants of sales and paid conversion rate (paid / free) of web novel series, focusing on the web novel market among high potential serial digital contents. It is relatively recent that the web novel market has grown rapidly, and since most web novel platforms provide very limited information, the quantitative analysis of the web novel market is limited. In this study, we focused on “munpia (www.munpia.com)” among various web novel platforms. It began as a mysterious novelist, Kim Hwan-chul, who began a personal blog in 2002 as a web novel site, and has grown to become a representative web novel platform with a monthly average of 750,000 visitors. According to the audit report of the Financial Supervisory Service’s electronic disclosure system (DART) in 2018, Munpia Co., Ltd.’s sales in 2018 increased by 31% from KRW 16.7 billion in 2017 to KRW 22 billion, and operating profit increased by 13% from KRW 4.7 billion in 2017 to KRW 5.4 billion. This study attempted quantitative analysis of the web novel industry by manually collecting data which provides more detailed information than other platforms such as Kakao Page and Naver Series. The growth of the webtoon and web novel market is overwhelming in the digital content market, and the growth of the snack culture content market is expected to continue for a long time in the future. In particular, previous e-book contents have been provided an electronic view of already published books. However, the current series contents are only published online completely. In particular, authors of serialized content are much more actively communicating with readers than before, and they are different from previous creators in that they can quickly read the market response and produce works that fit them. As a result of the empirical analysis, the most important variable in the web novel market was the response of the market in free serialization. In particular, the short-term conversion rate of readers at the time of transition from free serialization to paid serialization has a significant effect on both sales and conversion rate. In conclusion, it can be inferred from the results that the long - term performances of the works which give the consumers intention to pay even in the short term are also excellent. This can be explained by a kind of threshold effect on the intention of payment. On the other hand, the role of the publisher (agency) has been confirmed to be rare in the web novel market, and whether the previous work is also meaningless is not significant. On the other hand, the formation of the fixed readership (mania) in the artist unit is still significant, indicating that the formation of a fixed readership, represented by preference and cumulative preference.