Less than a decade in action, one of the key ‘online literature’ serialization platforms, Radish, is to shutter on December 31.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

‘To Efficiently Advance Our Storytelling Business’

A year after its 2016, launch, Publishing Perspectives asked the COO of Radish Media, Paul Baek, why this online-serial platform for YA romance was named for a small vegetable. “One of the founders was eating radishes at the time,” Baek said in a smiling verbal shrug that might have foretold his own departure months later.

As it has turned out, on Thursday (July 3), Radish announced that it will close operations on December 31.

Users got the word in an email from the company which, since 2021 has been owned by South Korea’s Kakao Entertainment, which reportedly paid more than US$400 million for Radish. One Asian press account quotes a Kakao spokesman as saying that the company plans to focus “our efforts” on Tapas “after discontinuing Radish in North America to efficiently advance our storytelling business.”

At this point, Radish’s statistics page indicates that the platform has reached more than 20,000 published stories (serials) by more than 2,000 authors, attracting more than 500 million episode reads.

Those more-than 2,000 authors are told in the closure announcement that they’ll continue to receive royalty payments ‘at our normal rate” through the remainder of the platform’s operation online.

‘Bite-Sized Fiction, Anytime, Anywhere’

Paul Baek, a son of Korean immigrants born in Shreveport, Louisiana, was raised in Tallahassee, Florida, and had come to his work from studies in psychology at Harvard—and K-ballad stardom (we’re not kidding)—and he’d go on to work for Google in Tokyo and to handle strategy direction for Troy Carter’s artist-management firm Atom Factor, and finally to establish his own company, Matter of Fact, a line of skincare products he formulated himself.

But there was that year with Radish. The multitalented Mr. Baek arrived at Radish in its infancy in 2016, to work with the Korean entrepreneur Seung Yoon Lee and CTO Joy Cho, the two co-founders of the Web-story cache named for a Valentine-colored vegetable.

Its basic model—not uncommon in the monetized Wattpadian moment—was that writers would be paid for gathering reads.

RadishFiction.com was based on a kind of perpetual freemium structure, the promise of “bite-sized fiction, anytime, anywhere”: A reader could wait for each serialized installment of a writer’s story to be released or make a micropayment to get a new chapter delivered more quickly. Purchasing Radish coins with which to make micropayments, a user could get sped-up delivery of a chapter and, within a year, there were reports that one writer was earning some US$13,000 per month, as the popularity of “online literature” spread far beyond Asia.

Along the way, in 2019, Seung-yoon Lee would report that Radish had some 700,000 users and a top monthly payment to a single author of US$43,000. Lee hired a former executive at ABC Daytime Television, Sue Johnson, to create a “writers’ room” with veteran soap-opera screenwriters to develop seasons of cliffhanging serials as premium, professionally produced content.

This move was branded as “Radish Originals,” with Lee making no secret of his admiration for Netflix’s work in a similar direction. Lee told us, “I’ve always been inspired by how Netflix innovated the video entertainment industry with its integration of production and distribution, and [I] wanted to build such a game-changing model for text entertainment as well.”

‘An Original Mobile Serial Fiction Platform Like Us’

Does this year’s demise of Radish have implications for “online literature” overall?

One factor to consider is that while serialization in other formats is still very popular in China—where some of the world’s largest storytelling platforms  have flourished—we do get less analysis in our China Bestsellers reporting these days than we did a couple of years ago that print releases are being made of books that originated online. Still, per Lee’s mention of Netflix, the streamers show us that serialization itself has never been more popular in visual storytelling.

“I think the greatest potential of an original mobile serial fiction platform like us,” Lee said to us in 2017, “is in the intellectual property. While the development of TV and/or film is not a short-term strategy, that’s the direction that we ultimately want to move into.”

Maybe Radish’s concept of “text entertainment”—a particularly evocative phrase—does have its limits and we’ll see more broad platforms sag in the near future. Or maybe it’s just time for a new vegetable to lend its name to a storytelling medium.

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More from Publishing Perspectives on serialization is here, more on digital publishing is here, and more on book-to-screen development is here.