K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

Korea’s listed content industry, counted whole

Name: Korea’s listed content industry, all 248 companies
Creator: K Culture Wire

Not the famous companies — all 248 of them. Every listed Korean company filing under broadcasting, film and audio production, or publishing, from the 2025 annual reports. 68,809 people.

Against the market it sits in

Group	Companies	Staff	Avg tenure	Women	Avg pay	Company age
Broadcasting	12	6,393	10.33 yr	47.5%	₩87.0m	31.5 yr
Film, video and audio production	40	10,540	7.32 yr	56.9%	₩63.1m	25.7 yr
Publishing (includes games)	196	51,876	5.44 yr	34.1%	₩77.4m	22.5 yr
All content companies	248	68,809	6.18 yr	38.8%	₩76.1m	23.9 yr
Every listed Korean company	2,779	1,865,198	11.29 yr	28.0%	₩95.1m	43.5 yr

Every group figure is weighted by headcount, so a 3,000-person studio and a 40-person label each count for their own staff rather than one company one vote. The last row is the same field on the same filing for the whole market — it is a baseline, not a ranking.

Two things the whole-industry view shows that the famous names do not

Content stays about half as long6.18 yr vs 11.29Across 248 companies and 68,809 people — the same gap we found in the fourteen best-known firms holds for the whole industry.

And it is far more of a women’s industry38.8% vs 28.0%Production is 56.9% women; publishing and games is 34.1%. The split inside the industry is wider than the gap to the market outside it.

The broadcasters are the oldest, the longest-serving — and the ones losing the export trade

Broadcasting is 12 companies with 10.33 years of average tenure, the longest in Korean content and close to the market as a whole. Publishing and games sit at 5.44.

Set that against what those companies sell abroad. Terrestrial broadcasters were 81.5% of Korea’s television exports in 2012 and 7.2% in 2024, while independent producers went from 7.2% to 51.4% — the thirteen-year table is here. The export trade moved from the long-tenure companies to the short-tenure ones. The filings and the trade statistics are separate sources and we are placing them side by side, not claiming one caused the other.

How much of that is simply being younger

Tenure is weighted by headcount, so each figure is the average tenure of a person working in that group rather than of a company. Companies are then banded by their own age, so the comparison holds firm age roughly fixed.

Content (248 firms)	6.18 years	23.9 years old
Everything else (2,505 firms)	11.49 years	44.3 years old

Content companies hold staff 1.86× less long, and they are 20.4 years younger. Band both sides by the companies' own age and the gap narrows — but it does not close.

Company age	Content firms	Their tenure	Everyone else	Ratio
under 15 years	68	3.91 yrs	8.07 yrs	2.06×
15 to 30 years	144	6.18 yrs	9.37 yrs	1.52×
30 to 50 years	35	8.39 yrs	11.1 yrs	1.32×
50 years or more	1	9.5 yrs	13.6 yrs	—

Across the 3 bands we will read, the ratio runs from 2.06× down to 1.32×. Holding firm age roughly fixed takes the gap from 1.86× to 1.32×, and never to 1. Being younger explains some of it, not most of it.

One band is left unread — the rule is fewer than 5 companies on either side. A band with fewer than 5 companies on either side reports no ratio, because a ratio over four companies is a reading of four companies. And these are listed companies only. Listed companies only. Much of Korean content production is unlisted and files none of this, so nothing here describes those firms. 2,753 companies disclose tenure, headcount and incorporation year, and every figure here uses those same rows.

What we wrote from this data

Korea’s content firms are 3 labour markets, not one
Broadcasting holds staff 10.3 years, film 7.3, publishing and games 5.4. Pay runs the other way from what that suggests: film pays ₩63.1m against publishing's ₩77.4m while keeping people longer.
8 August 2026
Korean content firms are 38.8% women against 28%
Film, video and audio production is 56.9% women. Publishing and games is 34.1%. Both sit above the whole listed market. The 22.8-point gap inside one sector is the larger fact and the filings do not explain it.
8 August 2026
Korean content firms hold staff half as long. Age is part
Content firms average 23.9 years old against 44.3 for the rest of the listed market, and you cannot have long tenure at a young firm. Band companies by their own age and the tenure gap narrows from 1.86× to 1.32× — it never closes.
8 August 2026
Korea’s TV exports moved to firms where people stay half
Terrestrial broadcasters were 81.5% of Korea's TV exports in 2012 and 7.2% in 2024. Their staff average 10.3 years of service — the longest in Korean content. The producers who took the trade average 5.4 to 7.3.
7 August 2026 · corrected
Korea’s pop-culture firms employ 15,072, for half as long
Netflix's Korean catalogue has been watched 23.7 billion hours. The listed companies in that business keep staff 5.5 years against 11.3 across Korea's listed market — and their two halves are mirror-image workforces.
6 August 2026

Where these numbers come from

Financial Supervisory Service (Korea), DART annual report employee disclosures, filing year 2025 (DART (금융감독원 전자공시) 「직원 등의 현황」).
Which companies are in. Every listed company whose own filed industry code is broadcasting, film/video/audio production, or publishing. Korean game companies file as publishing, which is why games sit in that row. We did not hand-pick the list.
1 company dropped. It does not report both tenure and headcount in this filing, so it cannot be weighted and is excluded rather than counted as zero.
🔴 Pay corrected 2026-08-07. The average pay figures were understated, because companies that disclose headcount but not pay were left in the denominator — their staff were being averaged in as if they earned nothing. Pay is now weighted over disclosing companies only, which is 99.3% of content staff and 98.9% of the listed market. Content pay rises from ₩75.6m to ₩76.1m and the market from ₩94.0m to ₩95.1m. Tenure, headcount and the gender split were computed from companies that disclose them and do not move.
Not a ranking, and not a judgement. Average tenure falls when people leave and also when people arrive — a company that doubles its headcount halves its average tenure without a single resignation. No company is named on this page for that reason.
Privately held studios are not here. Several of Korea’s busiest production houses file no comparable disclosure, so this is the listed part of the industry and not all of it.

Fourteen of these companies — the best-known agencies and game studios — are broken out individually on the workforce page.

Who the labels reach, and how much of it is one artist

Two more tables sit on the company side of our data. Label reach counts how many readers each label's roster draws in English, and reach per artist divides that by the number of artists — which is where a label carried by one name stops looking like a label with a roster.

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