The business — companies, exports, pay and the shape of the market.
14 articles.
Two works can carry the same English title, and a chart row does not say which one it is. Thirteen titles in our Korean panel turned out to be foreign works. The test that found them is not the name — it is where they charted.
Across 803 matched pairs, a Korean series sits at rank 5.71 on the weeks a stablemate shares the chart and 5.21 on the weeks it is alone. The direction is the one schedulers fear. The size is half of one place out of ten.
Korean titles hold 7.6% of the world's Netflix top 10 places — 37,666 of 492,900. Of those, 82.5% carry the label we use to exclude same-name foreign works. 16.1% carry no label at all, and we keep them because we cannot check them.
Of 287 charting Korean series with a company credit, the 238 that aired on a Korean network reach a median 4 markets. The 49 with no broadcaster on record reach 39. They are 17.1% of the titles and 39.4% of the chart places.
A series charts in 33.4% of countries where its company had already charted and 8.6% where it had not. Comparing each series against itself removes age, strength and size, and the gap widens. It reverses in five markets, four English.
Across 207 companies with a charting Korean title, catalogue size tracks total reach (r = 0.536) and not reach per title (r = −0.101). Firms with 20 or more titles get 13 markets from the median title; firms with two get 10.8.
Of 129 companies credited on the 332 Korean series that reached a Netflix country top 10, three account for half. Counting production credits alone — the answer to the obvious objection — it is 5 of 99, on a thinner base of 151 series.
In ten of thirteen years the two are within 20% of each other. Their year-on-year growth correlates at −0.13. Two industries arriving at the same number by unrelated routes, until 2024 pulled them apart.
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.
Platforms average ₩94.5bn in revenue; content providers average ₩1.5bn. Three-quarters of all webtoon businesses take less than ₩1bn a year, and 214 of them have fewer than ten staff.
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.
Korean titles have drawn between 74 and 79 million hours a week from Netflix's global chart in every year that did not carry a Squid Game release. Over the same span, music and broadcast exports went from $1.88bn to $3.06bn.
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.
396 webtoon businesses were surveyed in 2024. The 28 platforms average ₩94.5bn each; the 368 content providers average ₩1.5bn. The average describes almost nobody, and the studios that draw the comics sit at the bottom of it.