The glory of **Squid Game**,
the dark underbelly of its subcontracted base

Korean dramas have become the heart of global OTT platforms. Across the world, audiences read Korean dialogue with subtitles, memorize the names of Korean actors, and embrace Korean narrative grammar as a pillar of global standards. As Squid Game demonstrated, Korean stories are no longer peripheral content—they are now a central language of global popular culture.

However, there is a rarely discussed shadow to this glory — the loss of IP (intellectual property) sovereignty. Global capital generously funds production costs, sometimes on a scale that the domestic market cannot bear. In return, it takes the entire additional revenue from a hit, the secondary rights, and even the authority to decide the work’s fate.

Korea creates world-class stories, but most of the wealth generated by those stories is recorded on the platforms’ books.

The Politicization of Platform Rankings and Distortion of the Ecosystem

The issue goes beyond mere revenue distribution. The moment a particular OTT’s internal Top 10 ranking becomes the market’s absolute authority, the very grammar of content creation begins bending to suit that authority’s tastes. The intensity of stimulation rewarded by algorithms, standardized “hooking” techniques designed to prevent early drop-offs—what constitutes a “good story” is quietly replaced by the platform’s user retention metrics.

The result is the gentle death of diversity. Slow-paced, adventurous narratives are eliminated under the stigma of “inefficiency,” and as domestic broadcasting platforms shrink, the very stages for debut writers and actors diminish. In a structure where distribution power dictates the creative landscape, the future of an entire industry becomes hostage to the programming preferences of just one or two platforms.

Neutral data transforming the production company’s negotiation power

At the heart of this imbalance lies information asymmetry. While the platform knows most accurately how much a given work is truly loved, it never discloses that data. The KI Drama Index breaks this asymmetry by integrating multiple publicly available signals—including consolidated news coverage density, community-driven topicality, and cast member prominence—to reconstruct a work’s independent value using only external, publicly accessible indicators.

Restoring Value Centered on Creators

Independent data references are not mere reference materials—they become the production company’s negotiation weapon. During IP negotiations with major platforms and at overseas rights contract tables, only when we can substantiate “our work has genuinely been loved this much” with third-party, neutral data can we finally speak on equal footing—not from a position of dependence.

Data becomes the lever that reclaims creative power from distribution power.

Breakwater Protecting the Power of K-Story

In an era where distribution dominates creation, someone must establish an independent and neutral standard of value between the two. Without it, the glory of Korean dramas could at any moment be reduced to “a brief boom occurring on someone else’s platform.” KONTENTS INDEX aims to serve as a breakwater, ensuring that the inherent power of Korean stories is fairly evaluated—and that their value flows back to creators.