The economics of Korean content.

The most useful number to start with is the trade surplus.

In 2024, South Korea's cultural-content industry exported $14.08 billion of work — films, broadcasts, music, games, comics, animation, advertising, characters, and publishing — and imported $915.56 million. The arithmetic produces a $13.16 billion surplus, the second consecutive all-time high on the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism's record. Total industry revenue cleared 157.4 trillion won, roughly $107 billion at year-end exchange rates.^[1]

That single sentence sets up most of what follows. A country with a population of about 52 million is operating a creative export sector larger, by trade balance, than many G20 members' creative sectors operate in absolute terms. The asymmetry between the size of the home market and the size of the international demand is the structural fact about Korean content, and it is the fact that any business question — including the question of a domain like the one this journal is attached to — eventually returns to.

The shape of the export

The headline number breaks into uneven pieces. Games are the largest single component of cultural-content exports by far: $8.5 billion in 2024, or 60.4 percent of the total.^[1] Music contributed $1.8 billion; broadcasting and video, $1.26 billion.^[1]

The broadcasting-and-video line is the smallest of the three named here and the most relevant to the .TV question. It also has the steepest recent slope. The Motion Picture Association's 2026 report with Oxford Economics found that Korean film and television exports rose from 899 billion won in 2019 ($612 million) to 1.8 trillion won in 2024 ($1.2 billion) — a compound annual growth rate of 14.5 percent over five years. For context, the report notes that 2024 figure exceeded Korea's exports of beverages and spirits and exceeded its exports of railway locomotives.^[2]

By revenue, broadcasting is the largest creative sector.

Within Korea's domestic cultural-content industry, broadcasting and video accounted for 24.99 trillion won — 15.9 percent of the total — of 2024 revenue. It is the single largest sector by revenue. Source: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, reported in The Korea Herald, February 2026.^[3]

Why the surplus is structural, not cyclical

A trade surplus this size, sustained for multiple years, is not the artifact of one show. It rests on three things that took roughly two decades to build:

Production infrastructure. Korea's screen industry generated $16 billion in economic value and supported 291,000 jobs in 2025, per the MPA / Oxford Economics study, and operates under a mature mix of public broadcasters (KBS, MBC, SBS) and private and conglomerate-affiliated studios. Major US studios — Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Disney, Amazon, and Warner Bros. Discovery — all maintain active production and distribution relationships with Korean producers.^[2]

Licensing and platform partnership. Korea's largest content company, CJ ENM, announced an $818 million content budget for 2025 and operates through a mix of Netflix originals, partnerships with WBD and Fifth Season, and the international rollout of its own streaming platform, Tving.^[4] Netflix's published 2024–2028 commitment to Korean content is $2.5 billion, alongside in-house facilities including Studio 139 and Samsung Studio operating locally.^[4]

A training pipeline. The Korea Creative Content Agency and the Ministry of Culture committed 43 billion won ($29.3 million) under a 2026 roadmap to train about 3,400 professionals across AI, creative, and export-oriented roles — including a Netflix-partnered program retraining 1,000 VOD specialists in planning and post-production.^[2] Whatever this produces over the next several years, it is the kind of supply-side investment that does not show up in this year's export number but shows up in many of the export numbers after it.

The Netflix datum

The cleanest external measurement of Korean content's global pull comes from Netflix's own self-reported viewing data, as analyzed by Ampere Analysis in April 2025. South Korean titles accounted for 7.7 billion hours of Netflix viewing in the second half of 2024 — roughly 8 percent of all viewing on the platform globally — and 85 of the top 500 most-watched non-US titles, or 17 percent of that catalog.^[5]

The same report ranks Korea second only to the United States as a country of origin for streaming hours on Netflix worldwide, with the UK at 7 to 8 percent and Japan at 4 to 5 percent over the same period.^[5] A follow-on Ampere analysis in early 2026 reported that the Korean share of new non-English Netflix originals climbed from 12 percent in 2024 to 20 percent in 2025, the single largest year-over-year gain of any language group on the platform.^[6]

"Korean content has played a central role in Netflix's global success, not just with breakout hits like 'Squid Game' and 'Kingdom,' but by consistently driving strong viewership." Orina Zhao, Research Manager, Ampere Analysis

Music as a parallel system

The export breakdown above puts music at $1.8 billion — larger than broadcasting and video as an export line, smaller than games. Korea's music sector is dominated by a small number of integrated agencies (HYBE, SM, JYP, YG, and adjacent companies) operating an artist-development pipeline that, by Statista's reporting, generated 12.6 trillion won in total industry revenue in 2023, with an export value above $1.2 billion lifted by the broader Hallyu phenomenon.^[7]

Externally, the most legible measurement of K-pop's reach comes from Luminate's annual reports and from K-Pop Radar's YouTube-views tracker. The latter's 2025 year-end analysis put South Korea, Japan, and Indonesia as the top three markets by consumption, with the United States in fourth place at 6.25 percent of global K-pop YouTube views — up one rank from 2024 — and the UK rising sharply to 17th from outside the top 20.^[8]

The relevant pattern, as with broadcasting, is that the export base is broadening rather than concentrating: the same data shows France, Germany, Canada, and Taiwan all moving up the rankings, against a domestic Korean market that grew its own share year over year.

The tourism spillover

One of the more surprising figures comes from Netflix's own retrospective, published in late 2025 and summarized by The Korea Herald. The streamer reported that 72 percent of its users who watched Korean content responded that they would be interested in visiting the country, and cited specific commercial spillovers — the green tracksuits from Squid Game as the top-searched Halloween costume in two consecutive years; sales of white Vans slip-ons up nearly 8,000 percent after the series' release.^[9]

The dollar-figure example Netflix cited was the 2025 drama When Life Gives You Tangerines, which the company estimates contributed more than 90 billion won (about $60 million) to the Korean economy, partly through tourism to filming locations on Jeju.^[9] The pattern is unusual: content as a leading indicator for travel demand to the originating country.

What the next decade probably looks like

None of the above guarantees that the slope continues. The MPA report itself flags meaningful pressures: theatrical attendance has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, the mid-budget production segment is contracting under cost pressure, and the heavy weighting toward platform partnerships introduces concentration risk.^[2] Domestically, Korea's music industry is showing the first signs of cooling — physical album sales down 9 percent year on year, digital track consumption down 6.4 percent — even as international consumption continues to grow.^[10]

The directionally honest version of the forecast is something like this: Korea has built durable production capacity, durable distribution relationships, and a durable training pipeline for the next cohort of creators. The export base is wider and more language-diverse than it was three years ago. The trade surplus is structural in the same way Japan's surplus in industrial machinery is structural — it reflects accumulated capacity that does not unwind in a single year.

For anyone holding or seeking an address that represents this category, those are useful conditions. They do not constitute a valuation. They do, however, describe the underlying industry that any "Korea + television" domain sits adjacent to — and the rate at which the adjacent industry is still growing.

The next two essays in this journal address the other half of the question: the cross-vector pull of the Korea brand across tourism, food, and beauty in 2026, and how the global audience for Korean media learned, and is still learning, to read Korean.