산업이 된 K-콘텐츠

In 2022, Korea earned more than thirteen billion dollars from exporting content such as music, dramas, films, games and comics. That number would have surprised almost anyone in the 1990s, when Korean pop culture was barely known outside the country. The change did not happen all at once. It came in waves, and each wave used a new way of reaching people.

The first wave was carried by television. In 2003, the drama Winter Sonata aired on Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, and its lead actor became a star across Japan. In the same year, Jewel in the Palace, a drama about a cook in the royal kitchen, began a journey that took it to about ninety countries. Broadcasters across Asia found that Korean dramas were well made.X-ray They began to buy more of them.

Music was next. In the late 1990s, K-pop agencies had built a training system in which young performers studied singing, dancing and languages for years before their debut. When YouTube arrived, that system met a channel that could reach the whole world. In 2012, PSY’s “Gangnam Style” became the first video to pass one billion views on YouTube. A year later, a group called BTS made its debut. In 2020, its song “Dynamite” became the first song by a Korean act to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

Then streaming services changed the scale again. In 2019, the film Parasite won the top prize at Cannes, and in 2020 it became the first film not in English to win the Oscar for Best Picture. In 2021, Squid Game reached number one on Netflix in ninety-four countries. A Korean story could now reach a global audience on the same day it was released at home.

Webtoons show the newest part of the industry. These are comics made to be read on a phone.X-ray You read them by scrolling down a single long strip. Daum started Korea’s first commercial webtoon service in 2003, and NAVER followed in 2004. Many popular webtoons have since been turned into films and series, so one good story can earn money several times. In 2024, Webtoon Entertainment, the company that runs NAVER’s global webtoon business, was listed on the Nasdaq stock market in New York.

For people in business, the lesson of K-content is not only about culture. Korean companies kept investing in new formats, used each new platform early, and treated a hit as the start of a series of products rather than the end of a project. When a foreign partner mentions a Korean drama or song, it is often a good way into a wider conversation about how Korean industries grow.