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In the 5th, final installment of my interview, the founders of dramafever.com discuss their monetization plans for the site, and the unique offering to the kdrama fan community.

Previous parts: Part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

The introduction to the site is here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Xiaochang: How did you come to decide on an add-supported monetization model rather than a subscription model?

Suk Park: Given our research on the existing illegal platforms, the issue was about capturing market share. It seems unrealistic to come out with a pay-per-view model, which was the other alternative, when all this content was being offered for free. So the best approach to capture market-share fast, and away from the free sites seemed to be to offer an equally free site, but with much higher quality and a better user experience to get our brand out. Now does that mean that going forward we might or might not include a premium site without ads? That’s still to be discussed. But given what we’re seeing in the market, we’ve adapted our business model according to that.

Seung Bak: Let me just add to that — I think over time we will offer a variety of ways for people to consume this content because there’s a bunch of people who want to watch for free and will watch ads, and there’s a lot of people who want to will pay for it without ads, and it’s just a function of us trying to figure out how we can provide packages and offerings with people in a variety of spectrums. The real costs associated with different sorts of models — it doesn’t have to be an either/or kind of thing. The right answer is probably something in between and something we have to figure out in the coming months.

Suk Park: One thing’s for sure: we will not get rid of our free offering.

Seung Bak: Yes, there will always be a substantial free offering. This is not a bait-and-switch game. We’re trying to build a real destination site, and there’s always going to be a free component. But there might be an opportunity for us to create some premium offerings that complement what we have.

Xiaochang: So coming out of beta, what sort of tactics will you be taking to get the word out about Dramafever?

Seung Bak: Let me just recap what we’ve been doing. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, our first priority was engaging the early adopters. The early adopters are people who are going to dramabeans and they other sorts of blogs and going to d-addicts and consuming on mysoju and so forth. Our main priority in the beta phase was to make sure that the site works perfectly. So right now, we still have some kinks to work out, there’s lot of little things we have to fix and we’re also developing new features so that the site will be more robust than what we have now. We’re also trying to line up some anchoring sponsors to go with the initial launch. So there’s a lot of moving pieces that we have right now. But I think that the goal is to have a very PR-driven campaign. So in the early phase, in the beta phase, there was a lot of working with the niche fan-oriented blogs. When we officially launch, we’re going to engage a lot of the mainstream blogs and the mainstream blogs and the mainstream media to really kick it off with a big bang. I think the thing that we’re getting right is that we got to make sure that we have a very good user experience and we reply to every single feedback that we get from people, which I think is unheard of. I think if you try to write mysoju and email, they probably never get back. WE’re offering people a very high level of service even though it’s a very free site. We’re actively engaging the users and actively engaging the community and I think we’re just going to build on that as we move toward our formal launch.

Xiaochang: Out of curiosity, how many people are you right now?

Seung Bak: There’s a core team of 5 people: Suk and myself, and we have a CTO, and a developer and a graphic designer. And then we have an additional group of 10 people who are helping us in different freelance and consulting capacities who bring in different skill-sets. Some could be finance, some could be on licensing and sales or more strategic stuff. So, a fully staffed team and we’ll just get bigger and bigger as we go along.

Xiaochang: Okay, one last question, which about the community you’re planning on building. How do you see this community on your site as any way different than the communities that are on the sites like d-addicts that are already built elsewhere that are already talking about this content? What’s going to make them want to do the same thing on your site?

Seung Bak: I mean, if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game. Just because you have a community about a particular subject doesn’t mean that no one else could have it. The approach that we’re taking is that we’re not trying to become d-addicts nor are we trying to become mysoju or soompie or any of these other existing places where people are hanging out. What we’re doing is that we’re hoping to ultimately compliment the sort of ecosystem of Asian entertainment in this country, so the features that we’re building are very dramafever centric — they’ll be around the dramas that we carry, they’ll be around the way people are experiencing content. It’ll be around stuff that we’re creating for people. So, we’re not going to go out and create a wiki because that’s already being very well addressed by d-addicts, and the people who are going to d-addicts are also our audience members and the people who are running it are potentially our friends and our partners. So when we talk community, we’re talking offering features unique to our site.

The 4th installment of my interview with the founders of Dramafever.com delves into their relationship with fans and efforts to fulfill what they viewed as a clear market need. Of particular interest is the discussion on how they select content based on observing audience-enagement on fan-driven sites and the site’s success in collaborating with the fansubbing community.

Part 1, part 2, and part 3 of the interview are available.

The introduction to the site is here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

[images screencapped from dramabeans.com]

Xiaochang: It’s interesting that you mentioned earlier that people who are already on these illegal sites are coming and rewatching content on your site. It almost seems like you guys aren’t so much direct competitors since you offer a different sort of audience experience.

Seung Bak: To be totally candid with you, we don’t really look at Mysoju or some of these illegal sites as real competitive threats because they’re filling a market need at this moment and the market need is that there’s a demand for this content. If a legal provider isn’t going to put it together in a way that’s accessible, someone is going to put a simple HTML site together where you can watch it illegally. And the experience is the same as with American mainstream media. Before Hulu and Apple and a lot of these other places started distributing digital content in a legitimate way, there was stuff all over Youtube and other illegal sites. And as soon as legal platforms started taking off, that stuff started disappearing. Mostly organically, some of it due to DMCA notices, but it’s not a sustainable model in the long run, when you’re operating a media site in a completely illegal way. Quality wins in the long run, that’s what we believe.

Xiaochang: How engaged or involved are you guys in the drama-watching experience? Are you guys drama fans as well?

Seung Bak: It’s funny that you say that because before we launched the beta, we used to watch dramas. But now that we’re running a site for dramas, there’s just so much stuff to do. We try to watch when we can and at least click through some of the episodes of the ones we carry, but because we’re doing this, it’s taking away our time to watch dramas.

Xiaochang: But prior to that, you were fans . . . ?

Seung Bak: Well, we watched enough to know that this content was really high quality and we could see why people would be really engaged in this content. Suk and I both watched a bunch of dramas, obviously not everything that came out, but the ones that were really popular. And we were like wow, this is great, why isn’t it available in the US? That was the most basic question that we asked. Why do I have to do to the supermarket to watch this? Which is the experience that a lot of people have here.

Xiaochang: Going back to the features you haven’t rolled out yet, are you guys planning on having anything to enhance community engagement? Forums, or anything of that nature?

Seung Bak: Yes, yes. We’re definitely going to have those. The forums will come when we get a little bit more traffic. It will come in due time.

Suk Park: There’s nothing more sad than an empty forum.

Xiaochang: So going back to your personal relationship with drama for a moment, how did you guys personally get into drama? What was that history like?

Seung Bak: As Suk mentioned, we’ve noticed that Korean dramas are pretty popular. Something we’ve been keeping an eye on and it’s pretty easy to see. Everytime I see my parents they’re watching a Korean drama. Your friends are watching this stuff. You go to some hotel room in China and you have nothing to watch and I think CCTV 9 has Korean dramas running 24/7. You go to Mexico, there’s some international channel showing Korean dramas in Spanish. It’s everywhere, except in the US in a very accessible way. So clearly we saw a business need for this, so the next step was trying to figure out if there was a real demand for this. That was the research process where we took just basically took a look at every drama-related site out there and we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of traffic going to mysoju and a lot of places. And so we decided to do something about it and built a site where people could really consume this stuff in a much higher quality way.

Xiaochang: So what sort of criteria do you look at when you’re deciding which dramas to host on your site? Is it just based on popularity in Asia or are there other considerations?

Seung Bak: It’s interesting you bring that up, because we are addressing the market that’s in the US right now, so it’s driven by popularity in the US channels right now. So we’re looking at what seems to be working on places like d-addicts, where people are talking about this. We’re getting very good feedback from bloggers about what’s popular. And it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going to stick. There are some shows that were not that popular in Korea per se, but a lot of people were engaged by it here.

Xiaochang: Can you give me an example?

Seung Bak: La Dolce Vita was an interesting example. It didn’t do all that well in Korea when it was airing. But here, there’s a certain about of people watching that.

Suk Park: Relative to how many people are watching the other things on out site. For instance, we know that one of the dramas we want to get right now is Boys Before Flowers as we’ve gotten a ton of request for that Drama.

Seung Bak: Every day, every hour . . .

Xiaochang: Related to that, actually, how soon after they air in Korea and in Asia are you looking to get things onto your site?

Suk Park: In the beginning, for a lot of the content owners — you can understand the site hadn’t launched yet when we wanted to sign contracts with them — they wanted to give us some of the older stuff first. And from the older stuff, we focused on the blockbusters. Going forward, once this model has been proven to the content owners, we expect to launch their content as soon after broadcast as possible.

Xiaochang: So going on that, I’ve read rumors in the drama blogosphere that you guys are talking about working with fansubbers in order to subtitle content.

Seung Bak: Well, I mean, the basic mindset is that the fansubbers exist because there’s a void in the market that isn’t addressed. So these are true fans. These are people who are very passionate about being able to enjoy this content and being able to share with others. And once you look at them in that light, they’re your best allies. So a lot of the content that’s coming out of Asia, [major producers] are only creating English subtitles for the ones that are selling through DVDs and it’s only a small subset of the content that’s being produced. So over time, as we start ramping up our site with a pretty broad selection of content, it only makes sense to work with these fansubbers because they’re also the audience. So the key point that I want to emphasize is that we want this to be a very community-driven site. We’re making our content selection, we’re making our functionality development choices really based on what we’re observing out there. We’re simply reacting to a market need and what the market is telling us.

Suk Park: We can talk a little bit about how fansubbers would sub not always dramas, but anime and so forth and they never got credit and they’re looking for a platform.

Seung Bak: Yeah, if you look at the fan community sort of as the Open Software development community, these are very talented, passionate individuals. And for the most part, they’re looking for some recognition for the work that they’re doing. And we think we could be a platform that could provide them with that, while addressing a very real need, which is creating a place where people can consume Asian content with English subtitles so that they can understand it.

Xiaochang: So traditionally fansubs were originally created with the idea that it could be widely shared throughout the community so long as no one is making off of it. How are you going to renegotiate that relationship now that money does enter into it.

Seung Bak: First of all, one of our key principles is that we do everything right. So we always ask permission before we do anything. And anyone (? This part was a little unclear on the recording) that we start working with in terms of putting our product out there is after we have conversations with them about the best way to work together. So when we say that we work with fansubbers, it’s not that we go to d-addicts and download fansubs and putting it up on the site. It’s going to be done in a way where we talk to them and set down some business terms that are acceptable and that both parties can be happy about.

Suk Park: So, one of the problems was that the minute the fansubbed material is included in sites like mysoju or crunchyroll and we start to make money off the fansubs, the fansubbers can be persecuted for infringement. Now, in our completely legal platform, the fact that we make money off the site, that doesn’t become an issue as long as we ask permission and, depending on what the fansubbers want, come to an agreement. In our experience, it seems that what the fansubbers want is recognition for what they’ve done.

Here then is part 3 of the full interview transcript with Seung Bak and Suk Park, the founders of the Asian Media streaming site Dramafever.This section deals with issues of audience measurement and engagement metric, as well as the challenges and opportunities licensed online video platforms face in light of the many unofficial sources of content out there.

Part 1 and part 2 of the interview are available, and the rest will be up soon.

And again, for an introduction to this case check here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Xiaochang: One of the big questions that always comes up is how do you measure audience engagement for advertisers?

Seung: Actually, that’s very easy for us. We have a video platform, so we know basically when people hit play and when they drop out. Mind you, all of our videos are pretty long, about an hour long each. And looking at all the aggregate stuff from traffic to date it was shocking. About half the people stay on until about the 90% of the video. On most video sites I think people drop off after about the first minute or so, but what we’re finding is that our drop off rate is very minimal, every 10 minutes 10% drop off, every five minutes another 2% drop off. We’re finding that about half the people are watching the whole episode every given time. So that’s just on the per drama episode basis and we’ll have to do more research but based on what we’re seeing now, our engagement rate is one of the highest on the internet from a video site perspective. These are very addictive dramas from what you’ve probably personally experienced.

Suk: When you talk about how do you measure audience engagement, what sort of advertisement are you referring to? Banners? Or TV ads? Or mostly online or other platforms?

Xiaochang: I mean, whatever you guys are using. Part of the question is just what sort of numbers are you presenting to your advertisers to tell them ‘this is the amount of people who are paying attention’ to your content?

Suk: It’s interesting because different metrics apply to different advertising platforms, so when you’re talking about impressions on a banner it gets tricky because it depends on the clicking of the banner and so forth. That’s when click-through rates when click through rates become a measure of ROI. When we’re talking about video ads, the conversation with the agency changes a little bit because although click-through rates are asked because they’re curious about what the regular click-through rates are, but what’s understood it that when these ads show up, 100% of the attention is focused on the ads. You cannot click forward, you cannot stop the ads, and if you want to watch the content — and 50% remain until the 95th percentile — you are watching the bulk of the ads. For branding opportunities, it’s as good as it gets in terms of getting attention and relate that particular advertisement to that particular audience.

Seung: Just to add to that, the way we’re distributing videos right now is pure streaming. This is not one of those things where you click play and you wait for the whole thing to download and you go away. Our site doesn’t work like that. It’s only streaming the bit of information you’re looking at at the moment, so if you click pause, that’s not getting accounted for in the engagement metrics. That’s why we’re very pleasantly surprised at the level of engagement that we’re having because these are long videos and to have 50% of the people stick through the end is pretty interesting.

Xiaochang: Where do you think the appeal of this content is for your audience? What makes Asian dramas, or Korean dramas, different from what else is out there?

Seung: I think for the most part, the stuff that we’re showing isn’t just any type of content. We’re curating some of the blockbusters from Korea, and certainly it’s heavily geared towards content that’s proven pretty popular throughout Asia. I think the common thread through Asian dramas and telenovelas and so forth is that it’s somewhat of a refreshing change from what you’re getting in American media. The story lines tend to be, for the most part, wholesome. They’re very engaging and it’s very linear — you can’t start from episode 24, you have to start at episode one and the story kind of pulls you in so that you watch the whole thing. The content itself has proven throughout the world that there’s tremendous appeal in it. What we’re proving here is that in the US where this content hasn’t been distributed in a way where the mainstream has been exposed to it and we’re hoping to be the platform that does that.

Suk: I would that it’s not that the content is better or worse. It is what it is. But we know that there’s a demand for it and we want to make it available in a legal way.

Seung: We had some initial assumptions before we launched our beta, and the whole idea was always to take information as we were getting it and be able to adapt and add new features. So when we lauched beta, we basically had one goal and that was to prove that there is a market for this by providing by far the best experience for viewing Korean dramas online right now. As you can see it’s pretty high quality. There’s almost no wait time. We feel pretty good about the results we’ve seen. It’s only been about a month and we’ve kept it pretty under the radar. We’ve only engaged the select sort of bloggers that cater to this audience. Very niche blogs. And while working with them, we got about 13,000 beta registrations within the first month, which is pretty good. And there’s an additional 20,000 – 30,000 people who came to our site who didn’t register and I think that’s the experience with closed beta in general. I think it shows that even with minimal marketing to date, and with a very small base of content, we were able to prove that there is a demand for all of this. I don’t want to extrapolate too much from a limited sample pool, but we’re getting lots of feedback from people and we feel good that this could easily spill over into somewhat of a mainstream audience based on what we’ve seen so far.

Xiaochang: If the does spill over into a mainstream audience, do you see it going on to some broadcast channels? Do you think will be different sorts of distribution channels for the content that’s not just online?

Seung: That could be. What our content licensers decide to do on their own is ultimately up to them. What we’re focusing on with Asian media companies is to offer them new audiences, to create a platform for them to monetize existing content. So we’re fundamentally web-focused. We want to create a destination site where people can experience the best content from Asia in an english-supported format so people can understand it.

Xiaochang: One of the appeals of sites like Mysoju and sites like d-addicts is that there’s such a wide array of content and this is one of the things that limited the rental circuit and certainly limited the broadcast channels in terms of limiting their audience, so where do you think you guys fit in with that? I mean, it does take time to get licensing deals and you can’t provide the range of content and be as responsive as the fansubbing groups who can turn around content in a day after it airs on TV in Korea.

Seung: That was one of our biggest concerns going into this. We started up the site with basically 10 titles. Even now we only have 14 titles and all of our titles are stuff that’s already been aired and a lot of people have already consumed it throughout the web. But in spite of the fact we have a very limited selection, we’re still able to get 13,000 beta registrations in month one. We’re getting consistent traffic everyday and we’re getting consistent feedback. A lot of this is people who’ve already watched the same content on mysoju but they want to watch it again. There’s also a lot of people who always felt a little weird going to an illegal pirated site, so they come to our site.

Suk: Your question is very interesting. There are other sites that have a wider variety of content, and immediate content that is broadcasting right now. How can we compete in that market? What Seung said it’s right — there are people who come to our site because of the better quality and because we’re a legal site. It’s exponentially harder to do things legally. The assumption that we made in the beginning, that we still hold to this day, is that going forward, maintaining these illegal sites will be harder and harder to do. From two different points: the first one is the advertising model. When you have an illegal site, you cannot bring direct sponsors to that site. You have to live by the advertising network that is willing to sponsor sites that infringe on intellectual property laws and so forth. The second one is that most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, they have to base a lot of their infrastructure on existing platforms. Mysoju loads all of their videos onto Veoh, youtube, etc. These companies also need to abide by much more stringent rules and regulations meant to protect IP, so if there is a site that consistently uploads material that doesn’t belong to them, it is their responsibility upon notification to take it down immediately.

Seung: I think Suk is addressing very good long term considerations that ultimately favor out business. You’re addressing very real concerns that we have, which is that we’re competing with these guys that basically have none of the hurdles that we face because they’re doing it illegally. But in the first month of our beta, we’re competing head-on with these guys. The illegal sites are still up and running, they’re running the same content that we have, and yet in spite of it we’re getting consistent traffic. And in fact, we’re adding new content every week and we’re noticing that every time we add content, we’re getting a spike in traffic. For all these reasons we feel pretty good that even though we’re at a competetive disadvantage when it comes to content selection, the simple fact that we’re offering an experience that is clearly superior to the illegal sites out there, that’s winning over an audience. And we feel that as we add more content, the audience will come, because they’re already coming with just 12, 13 titles.

[Screencap from hugely popular Korean Drama "Boys Over Flowers"]

Here then is part 2 of a multipart full interview transcript with Seung Bak and Suk Park, the founders of the Asian Media streaming site Dramafever. In this section, Seung and Suk talk about surprising audience demographics that reveal that the audience for Korean dramas might be more broad and more diverse in the US than previously imagined by the Broadcast networks.

Part 1 of the interview was posted last week. Keep an eye out for more of the interview in coming weeks as I get around to transcribing the recording.

And again, for an introduction to this case check here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Xiaochang: How did you go about approaching advertisers about this?

Suk Park: Advertising: it’s tricky. Right now, we’re using a bigger agency because our traffic is still small, being a closed beta. What we’re doing right now is we’re using the revenue from the Ad Network for the beta stage, and when we launch the full site later this year, we’re building direct relationship with the agencies and the advertisers to bring them in. We actually don’t need that many advertisers now because in the first couple of months the traffic won’t be that substantial.

Xiaochang: Along those lines, what do you tell your advertisers your target audience is? Who do you see as being the bulk of dramafever viewers?

Suk Park: That’s a great question because there’s current a couple of ways to analyze our current traffic. The licensing partners really care, as 40% of our audience is non-Asian. It’s a very easy way for individuals, without premium international TV satellite channel, or without having to go to sketchy Koreatown supermarkets to rent these DVDs, to access this type of content. So as a way of introducing their content into mainstream America, it’s a very low-risk offer for them.

Seung Bak: The current state of the market we found for the Korean broadcasters in this country is that their primary audience is basically Koreans, Koreans who are heavily geared toward the first generation. And their distribution, like Suk mentioned, are basically cable channels and supermarket DVD rentals. And here we’re coming out with this interesting concept and telling them that we’re going to take all the stuff they’ve already aired, to start with, and then we’re going to bring and introduce them to all this new potential audience, which is a very exciting prospect for someone like MBC. We’re talking about people who normally don’t consume this content, or if they do consume it it’s through illegal channels which they have no control over whatsoever. So one of the strongest value propositions we bring to the table is that we are broadening and expanding the audience in ways that they couldn’t in the current state. And as Suk just mentioned, we’re looking at the beta registrations and even we were somewhat surprised. We expected a lot of non-Koreans to sign up for this service, but I’ll say a very small minority are Korean-Americans, with the vast majority being other Asians and a lot of non-Asians.

Xiaochang: So the previous distribution channels seem to be limited in that they could only target what they already knew existed as an audience.

Suk Park: Now, mind you, because these are numbers based on a closed beta, there’s also a discrepancy with small numbers when we do any type of analysis. What’s interesting is that we can clearly assume that people who are registered for the beta are enthusiasts for this content. It turns out there was a lot of demand for this product outside of the first-generation Korean demographic, which brings us to what do we tell the advertisers? Our first iteration that was you would be able to brand yourself within the Asian-American population, or the Asian immigrant community in the US. And now we have upgraded to two basic concepts. One is the female audience — over 75% percent of the audience is female. So everybody who wants to attract a female audience, we would be a very good destination for branding and advertising. The second is an audience that we call Asian-content enthusiasts, but it’s an audience that watches international movies and international content outside of what would be classified as mainstream in the US.

Xiaochang: So you’re slightly changing the message to advertisers as you’ve seen a lot more non-Asian audience share come in, or was that the plan form the beginning that you would broaden it?

Suk Park: There was only a certain degree of what we could plan for from the beginning and a certain need for adaptability. We’re now adapting to what the reality is. The audience isn’t 90% or 100% Asian, it’s a wide spectrum of individuals. A lot of them female, that’s for sure, but a wide spectrum of age and race.

Xiaochang: Can I ask how you measure your audience?

Seung Bak: At the most direct level, we know how many people are registering and the information they use to register. Right now, we’re not asking people for a whole lot of info, just their gender and their birth date. But there’s a lot to be learned from the type of feedback they’re giving us and we’re getting a lot of feedback. And you notice that just by looking at names — and this is a very imperfect way of looking at it — but based on our sample, there are a lot of non-Asian last names in there. And even account for people having either been adopted, or interracially married and there’s still an overwhelming number. And we have a facebook group, which has around five hundred members right now, and if you look at the images of people who are leaving comments, we’re seeing caucausian ladies from the midwest. There’s a lot of non-Asian people in the facebook group as far as people writing on our walls. We’re still seeing a lot of Kim’s, Li’s, and Park’s, but they’re definitely in the minority.

[interviewer's note: this next bit is from a little later in the interview, but I decided to put it here for thematic continuity]

Seung Bak: We knew that there were a lot of Chinese and Filipinos and Asian demographics interested in this, but we really didn’t expect non-Asians to be big fans. We were hoping that we could get a lot of these people to watch this, but we were pretty surprised that even in the initial beta that there were people who you wouldn’t expect to consume this stuff who were actively consuming dramas. And they’re consuming dramas right now in a way where you kind of have to jump through hoops to watch them. Mysoju.com is a good example. I mean, these guys are blatantly ripping content left and right from every major Asian company out there, and if you notice they break stuff off into parts and if you’re watching something, there’s parts missing, the subtitles are weird, the quality is different because one part is on Veoh and another part is on Youtube and so forth. Yet people are still watching it. And there’s another set of people who are basically downloading through bittorrent. You click download before you go to bed and when you wake up you have a new drama to watch and then they go and find some fansub on a different site and figure out how to merge the two. So in spite of all these problems, there’s still a fair number of people who are consuming content this way. So the assumption was, what if you make this site very easy to use, what if you make it very high quality, and what if you just make the overall experience great. You could probably grab that audience and get more, and we’re starting to see some of that even at this very early stage.

So I have been lax on blogging lately because I am currently in the deepest depths of thesis crunch time, with some 80-100 pages to produce in the next three weeks. I do have a number of hopefully interesting pieces in the works, including one on hybrid and divergence economies that will be a deeper glimpse into some of the C3 work I’ve been doing that is sort of a follow-up to the post on the Fallacy of Free, as well as a rundown of the Transmedia as narrative entanglement and platform co-dependence presentation I gave while in Brazil.

In the mean time I thought I’d share the full transcript of my Dramafever.com interview from earlier this year. For anyone not yet aware, Dramafever.com is an ad-supported, fully-licensed online video platform dedicated to full-length Asian media content, in particular Korean TV dramas. For more details, I wrote an introduction to this case here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Part 1 of the full interview (which will run roughly 4 or 5 parts) focuses on how the company came to exist and the goals and motivations behind it, including the presence of a very visible and undercatered (at least, through authorized channels) audience.

Xiaochang Li: Can you remind me when you were planning on launching officially?

Seung Bak: It’s sort of a floating date right now, but we’re targeting end of Q1, beginning of Q2, so I guess around a March/April time frame. And the reason we’re in closed beta right now is to work through some kinks and develop some cool new features. We want to fully vet those things and have more content before we open it up so everyone can see it.

Xiaochang Li: Can you tell me about these ‘cool new features’ you’re planning on developing?

Seung Bak: Sure. Right now when we launched the beta, it’s essentially to make sure we get the core experience right — to put it simply: that you can watch dramas and [the experience] is high quality and enjoyable. And we for the most part accomplished that. Some of the features we want to build on are really to build on the experience. So you’re watching a Korean drama and you want to know everything about it, so there will be ancillary assets like pictures. You could have fun playing with, maybe with simple downloads, or you could add your pictures to pictures with actors. There’s also an opportunity to become an aggregator for news related to Asian entertainment that’ll help people save time and discover all these cool blogs that are out there that you would know if you spent all your time hanging out at Soompi, but which for the most part are sort of obscure. We would be a place that brings all of these good blogs to light and help people discover them. And there’s all kinds of stuff we could do around adding all this meta-data to dramas and actors and a lot of people could really engage in the storylines and really be able to discover new stories and really feel like they’re getting to know a certain celebrity. So, lot’s of ideas.

Suk Park: To add to what Seung said, basically we want to be able to create a community for people who enjoy this content as well as an information site for all the content relevant to the dramas, the actors, and so forth.

Xiaochang Li: So you guys see yourself as more of an Asian media content hub, instead of just a distribution platform?

Suk Park: Exactly. We wanted to build a place where you can watch the best of what Asia has to offer in terms of videos. We started out with kdramas, but it doesn’t have to be just kdramas. We’re going to get dramas from other parts of Asia, as well as other types of video content including TV variety shows and potentially movies and material related to music. And then we want to build all these tools for people not just to consume media but also have some fun on the site and be able to engage with other users.

Xiaochang Li: So what made you start out with kdrama?

Suk Park: So Seung and I met in college a long time ago — 1995, 1996—

Seung Bak: We’re both Korean, by the way.

Suk Park: And we always talked about doing something together. Because of our prior jobs, we had traveled across Asia and we noticed about two years ago that throughout East Asia — China, Japan, and Korea — and Southeast Asia —a lot of the Korean dramas were being played in prime time, either dubbed or subtitled. The Korean wave was taking over in a very obvious fashion. We came back to New York and we spent some time doing research to see if people in the US were consuming this type of content. And we saw the regular mediums: the television broadcasts, the DVD rentals, but it just didn’t seem like those were the only two distribution channels. We go online and we find about a dozen or two sites that feature this content, with very strong traffic numbers and every single one of these sites illegally using this content. My background is in international business and licensing so I jumped on a flight back to Korea to meet with the broadcasters, followed by trips bySeung and I to LA to visit the [Korean] broadcaster headquarters in the US and after going back and forth a couple of times, we were able to get the licensing for the for the dramas we have now.

Xiaochang Li: Can you give me a sense of when this was happening?

Suk Park: We went to China around the end of ‘07 and we started conversations with the broadcasters in the beginning of ‘08 which lasted for about eight or nine months before we signed the first contract.

Xiaochang Li: And why did you start out with MBC? And not KBS or SBS, for example?

Suk Park: Those guys were very forward thinking. They’re a group from LA. The other two companies were also very supportive of this idea. KBS is a little more cautious because they have to work within a strong hierarchy from Korea, and because they are government owned. MBC was really supportive and we were able to actually sign a contract with MBC to launch the beta site and move forward to the formal launch. From there we expect the other broadcasters to join us.

Seung Bak: We have active conversations with the other media companies right now. We just happen to have all the MBC stuff already done and prepared. But we’re going to be rolling out content from other sources throughout the year.

Xiaochang Li: So when you say that MBC was really forward thinking, what sort of reaction did you get when you guys first approached them?

Suk Park: There was a certain unfamiliarity with licensing for the online space. A couple of things we noticed with all the broadcasters were that everybody was struggling with online piracyand they were faced with serious doubt about the existing business model from cable and DVD rentals. Both of them were declining — television because the CPMs you get for television ads have been hurting badly and DVD rentals because it’s an obsolete form of consumption. We were able to address those issues with our business model, which presented to them a new revenue channel. Of course, by having a free product which is advertiser-supported and better than the existing pirated product, it becomes a strong weapon against piracy. That’s why all the broadcasters were actually very supportive of our model. The second question that came up though was “who the hell are you guys?” Because all we had was a powerpoint and a lot of passion. We had to prove to them that through our network of advisors and through our career history that we could pull this off. I managed the licensing aspect and Seung managed the operational aspect.Concurrently, I approaching and establishing a strong relationship with the licensing sources while Seung was building something that we could show them. And towards the end of last year we were able to launch the beta site and everyone was very happy with the results.

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium

Last week I introduced Dramafever, a new content-distribution and community platform dedicated to bringing Asian entertainment content to the US (currently in closed beta) that is posing some interesting questions about engaging niche audiences in an increasingly global media landscape. This week, I had a chance to sit down for an informative phone conversation with the Dramafever founders, Suk Park and Seung Bak, about their goals, their tactics, and how they’re negotiating the space between fan communities and commercial interests.

Expect the full interview transcript in the near future, though for now (and for those of us pressed tight for reading time), after the cut is a brief summation of some of the stand-out revelations on how to approach established communities, unexpected surplus audiences and the broadening appeal of Asian entertainment, and what the future holds for global media flows online.

Asian Drama and Audience Engagement
One of the most provocative and compelling finding Park and Bak shared from their early data, was the fact that there was an unexpectedly large proportion of Asian drama fans and site visitors who were not of any sort of Asian decent. When the two first developed the idea for dramafever.com — they had noticed the enormous popularity of Korean dramas throughout Asia and in parts of the rest of the world, but there appeared to be a gap in the US market, where a majority of licensed Asian content (with Anime being a notable exception) was being distributed predominantly on premium satellite television stations and ethnic grocery stores. Even after taking stock of the flourishing online communities around the unauthorized circulation of Korean and Japanese dramas, they had expected their audience to be primarily Asian-American, and heavily Korean due to their currently all-Korean content and positioned themselves to advertisers accordingly.

What they discovered was that nearly half of their subscribers and fans were not of any discernible Asian lineage, and that the audience for Asian media was far broader than what the limited targeting of broadcast channels and grocery-store rentals suggested.
This finding, though preliminary and not strictly scientific, given the limited numbers of beta-subscribers (estimated around 13,000), fits in line with much of what I’ve found in my own research, regarding the much more ambiguous and diverse audiences in Asian drama communities that cannot be addressed by broadcast channels that target audiences based on a predetermined demographic. Furthermore, it suggests that online platforms are an ideal means to “test the waters” of new national markets and build a following for content without large capital investments, much in the way that unauthorized fan circulation of Anime in the 80s and 90s primed the market for its present mainstream popularity.

Community Relations
One of the seemingly obvious and yet refreshing tactics taken by Park and Bak when launching the project involved extensive familiarity with and observation of some of the central hubs of distribution and discussion around Korean dramas. They realized quickly that there was vast amounts of information available in terms of what dramas were popular with English-speaking audiences and why — they simply had to pay attention.
As a result, they’ve built a philosophy around being open with their audience, and highly responsive, listening to and soliciting suggestions from their users and from existing discussion forums.

Moreover, they seem to have taken on the controversy of monetizing fansubbed content in a straight-forward and thoughtful manner. The problem that other sites have faced with fansubbers, they suggest, is that they’re not in open communication with fansubbers when their fansubbed content is uploaded. The fact that these sites then make money from that content then exposes fansubbers to legal risk, without any consent or benefits on the part of the fansubbers. Dramafever.com seeks to avoid these problems, which often stir up bad blood between distribution sites and their audience base, by not only having licenses for the content (thereby negating the legal risk), but also opening up negotiations with fansubbers from the very start in regards to compensation and use of materials.

The future of global content
When asked about where they fit in between struggling satellite TV stations with their premium prices and limited content and fan-organized drama communities able to offer an immense range of unauthorized content, the pair stressed sustainability and quality as goal. They point out that unauthorized sites are wildly popular in part because they are filling a very real market need that wasn’t being seen to by licensed distributors. In comparing the situation to American mainstream media before readily available legal download sources like hulu.com, apple, and netflix, they suggest that the audience will follow the availability of content and the quality of experience.

“Even though we are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to of content selection, we’re offering an experience that’s clearly superior to the illegal sites out there that’s winning over an audience,” Bak says, noting that they’re already seeing consistent traffic even in the closed beta stage, with significant spikes whenever there is new content uploaded.

More to the point, they suggest that these illegal distribution sources might not be sustainable in the long run. Not only does their unauthorized status prevent sites like mysoju.com from developing major sponsor relationships for revenue, “Most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, have to base their existing infrastructure on existing platforms” says Park. As a result, as sites such as Veoh and Youtube crack down on IP violations, content is lost, creating inconsistent user experiences.

Ultimately though, as much of what we discuss at C3 has shown, the audiences aren’t just getting content from any single distributor. “I think if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game,” says Park. Emails from viewers and other observation suggest that people who have already seen dramas from one site will watch them again on dramafever.com, thanks to the quality of video and the ease of use. “We’re not trying to become d-addicts or mysoju or these other places where people are hanging out. We’re trying to compliment the overall ecosystem of Asian entertainment consumption in this country.”

The future of global content
When asked about where they fit in between struggling satellite TV stations with their premium prices and limited content and fan-organized drama communities able to offer an immense range of unauthorized content, the pair stressed sustainability and quality as goal. They point out that unauthorized sites are wildly popular in part because they are filling a very real market need that wasn’t being seen to by licensed distributors. In comparing the situation to American mainstream media before readily available legal download sources like hulu.com, apple, and netflix, they suggest that the audience will follow the availability of content and the quality of experience.

“Even though we are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to of content selection, we’re offering an experience that’s clearly superior to the illegal sites out there that’s winning over an audience,” Bak says, noting that they’re already seeing consistent traffic even in the closed beta stage, with significant spikes whenever there is new content uploaded.

More to the point, they suggest that these illegal distribution sources might not be sustainable in the long run. Not only does their unauthorized status prevent sites like mysoju.com from developing major sponsor relationships for revenue, “Most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, have to base their existing infrastructure on existing platforms” says Park. As a result, as sites such as Veoh and Youtube crack down on IP violations, content is lost, creating inconsistent user experiences.

Ultimately though, as much of what we discuss at C3 has shown, the audiences aren’t just getting content from any single distributor. “I think if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game,” says Park. Emails from viewers and other observation suggest that people who have already seen dramas from one site will watch them again on dramafever.com, thanks to the quality of video and the ease of use. “We’re not trying to become d-addicts or mysoju or these other places where people are hanging out. We’re trying to compliment the overall ecosystem of Asian entertainment consumption in this country.”

Some thoughts as Dramafever develops
The platform, of course, is still in development. They’re working out some bugs and implementing community-oriented interactive features. A couple of things on my wishlist as they move forward:

– Ability to share and embed clips and images taken from the videos, and easy screenshot tools to use while watching in order to facilitate what are known as “pimp posts” and recaps (like this one for the Korean version of Boys Over Flowers) that play a significant role promoting content.

– Places for fans to add their own self-created ancillary content: recaps, reviews, fanvids, fiction, etc.

– Tools or interfaces to schedule viewings with friends to share the experience, and possibly collaboration with services such as the open-source Boxee that Sheila just posted about recently.

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium

On of the fascinating results of the increasing speed and accessibility of the present media landscape is that as the global reach of media content broadens, companies are becoming aware of increasingly fragmented, niched, and narrow audience segments. Such as the case with a new online VOD platform, dramafever.com, a hulu-esque service dedicated to providing high-quality streams of television content from East Asia to US audiences with small commercial interruptions from sponsoring advertisers. What makes this site a particularly interesting case to follow, beyond the explicitly transnational dynamic of the media content and audience (though due to licensing, dramafever.com can currently only provide content to users in the US), is the site’s ability and willingness to engage in the fandom as well as the history of the circulation of Asian drama content itself in relation to IP.

While still in beta, the service currently provides over a dozen of the most popular Korean dramas in recent years (including the shamelessly addictive Coffee Prince and My Lovely Sam Soon, the latter of which has been licensed for a remake by NBC), all subtitled in English, with plans to expand into a broader range of television content from across Asia. At the outset, they seem to be taking the right steps in engaging with the fandom at large, having announced the beta through a number of korean pop culture and drama fan blogs and encouraging people to submit requests for dramas that they would like to see the site host. In addition, though most of their subtitles are provided professionally by the content producers and broadcasters, they are also said to be in talks with popular kdrama fansubbing group With S2 to provide subtitles for less established dramas.

This move to collaborate with fansubbers is particularly inspired as fansubbers determine what is available and when, thus determining in many ways which dramas become popular with international audiences. In addition, fansubbing itself and the social protocols around circulating fansubs are taken very seriously within fandom. There has been some controversy in the past with sites such as crunchyroll.com which charges for certain services on the site, hosting user-uploaded fansubs that explicitly state they are not intended for any sort of commercial use.

Dramafever.com is also an interesting step in the well-established legacy of piracy “grey” markets for East Asian drama outside the countries of broadcast, which rose with the circulation of pirated VCDs and then moved online through fansubbing, torrents, and direct download providers such as megaupload and the Korean service Clubbox. While we have seen more traditional, broadcast efforts at tapping diasporic Asian-American audiences struggle in recent years, the online grey market circulation of streaming video and Asian drama torrents and downloads have been flourishing. Dramafever.com seems to seek to create a bridge between the two, bringing the appropriate broadcasting licenses and video quality together with the flexibility and responsiveness of the online environment expected by Asian drama fandom, and how it all plays out will provide critical insight into engaging and monetizing niche audience appeal.