The Web series In Korea

The advent of smartphones and the explosive increase in content consumption through smartphones was enough to suggest to people the need for new content. It was the'web drama' that attracted attention as the first runner. The domestic web drama, which started when the web drama 툰코 was released to Naver in February 2013, enjoyed a moment of interest in the golden age. Web dramas have been accepted as hopes to break down the existing broadcaster system that has been unchanged for years and create a new content market. However, as of 2019, these expectations have not yet come true. The biggest factor that has not been activated even in the production of many domestic web drama markets is that a stable profit structure has not been established. Since it was impossible to recover the production cost with a small amount of money received by the number of clicks exposed on the portal site, corporate or local government sponsors were the most important means of funding in the early web dramas.

Of course, the courageous challenge of producers who dared to make an investment decision and compete purely with a story was made, but most of the production costs could not be recovered, and making a sustainable web drama was very difficult. In the end, the absence of a profit model did not attract bold investment and the participation of competent talent. How can a good work come out without money and people? Even in difficult situations, web dramas were loved by fans like love playlists and teens, but they did not change the overall flow. However, the appearance of Netflix is ​​creating a new environment in this difficult domestic web drama market. Just as YouTube creates a profit structure for single creators, and as a new sustainable content market opens, Netflix serves as a stimulus to create a sustainable production environment for domestic web dramas. There may be a counter-argument to whether a drama that Netflix invests in a large amount of production costs can be seen as a web drama, but Netflix provides a web drama producer with a'production cost recovery market' that domestic online video platforms that have been distributing web dramas have not been able to create. It is true that expectations were given.

Whether or not Netflix will be able to function as expected, we need to watch a little more, but if dramas like Kingdom are continuously produced and successfully distributed in the world market, there will be a big change. In addition to ringing if you like to dramatize the webtoon of Cheon Gye-young, the first love of health teacher Eun Eun-young is the first, and dramas such as Netflix are being produced as the original, but the environment of the domestic web drama market will be qualitatively changed depending on the success of these works. If domestic broadcasters and telecommunications companies invest in this, web dramas will be loved in the global market along with TV dramas. Domestic web dramas are now undergoing a revolutionary transformation into a new environment in which they have to survive in the world market by competing with TV dramas by breaking away from past low-budget snack culture dramas. Whether you can survive the transformation now depends on how competitive the drama is.