Welcome to YouTube Millionaires, where we profile channels that have recently crossed the one million subscriber mark. There are channels crossing this threshold every week, and each has a story to tell about YouTube success. Read previous installments of YouTube Millionaires here.
This installment of YouTube Millionaires is brought to you by Epoxy. 
Korean dramas — or, more briefly, K-dramas — are beginning to pick up a sizable international audience. As Korean content becomes more popular online, DramaFever is picking up a sizable audience by distributing that content internationally. DramaFever’s library of more than 700 titles is available through a service that includes several paid tiers, and in order to entice potential viewers, the New York-based company has used YouTube as a promotional tool. On the DramaFever YouTube channel, viewers can find short clips from their favorite K-dramas, trailers for upcoming programs, and much more. As that destination surpasses one million subscribers, we spoke to Steve Corsello, the leader of DramaFever’s video marketing team, about his company’s YouTube strategy.
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Tubefilter: How does it feel to have one million subscribers on YouTube? What do you have to say to DramaFever’s fans?
Steve Corsello: It feels fantastic to pass the million subscriber mark. We’ve worked extremely hard to give our viewers on YouTube the best possible experience and this milestone affirms the effort.
We have the best fans in the world–they’re passionate, engaged, and extremely rewarding to interact with. Thank you for your support! We’re going to continue to do our utmost to bring you the best content from DramaFever everyday.
TF: Why do you think Asian dramas have become so popular internationally?
SC: Asian Dramas – and Korean Dramas particularly – provide a unique, fulfilling viewing experience, highlighting themes that easily transcend borders and regions and speak to elemental human experiences. In the Western Hemisphere especially, that is resonating with our growing body of users in a way that traditional American television doesn’t always do.
TF: How do you decide which clips to post on YouTube?
SC: One of our jobs is to actively curate our library and find those scenes that we think will speak to our viewers, and the YouTube audience in general, in the most powerful way about what DramaFever has to offer.
TF: The DramaFever YouTube channel has very good thumbnails. What strategies do you employ in order to make your videos highly clickable?
SC: Making a good thumbnail is an extremely difficult thing to do. We work very hard and spend a lot of time creating thumbnails that tell the viewer as much as possible about our videos and as much as possible about DramaFever’s brand.
TF: Has feedback from your viewers influenced your YouTube strategy in any ways?
SC: Absolutely. We believe it’s imperative to listen and respond to the community of Korean Drama fans and our subscribers on YouTube. Over the course of several years we’ve incorporated our fans’ invaluable feedback into every part of the channel.
TF: Would you say YouTube is more useful as a tool for drawing new fans to DramaFever or as a supplementary platform for engaging existing subscribers?
SC: YouTube is useful for both. For those existing fans on YouTube, we want to provide the best experience on the platform we possibly can by offering an exhaustively curated content set tailored specifically to the preferences of the users we already know. This strategy, coupled with great thumbnails and metadata, also allows us to communicate with those users who might likely become DramaFever fans, but don’t know us yet.
TF: Korean videos tend to draw huge audiences on YouTube. What, in your opinion, has spurned on that trend?
SC: Obviously, there is an enormous demand for this content all over the world; simply meeting the demand and increasing the accessibility of the content over time has driven a huge, and growing, viewership.
TF” A lot of the DramaFever YouTube channel’s most popular clips feature romance in some capacity. Why do you think that is?
SC: The dramas we license often feature a particular kind of romance that is unique to the content category; and, it’s something our viewers respond to very strongly. The strong views we’ve seen across those videos reflect the preferences of our audience and, trust me, we’ve noticed. We have every intention of making sure that viewers can find the passionate, romantic scenes so integral to the DramaFever experience on our channel.
TF: What’s next for the DramaFever YouTube channel? Any interesting plans?
SC: DramaFever is growing and expanding in really exciting ways and our work on YouTube will grow along with the company so stay tuned for all sorts of amazing stuff.
Quite a while ago we can began working with YouTubers and independent video creators to make content that captured or highlighted really fun parts of the KDrama world and spoke to DramaFever’s brand. This has been a fantastic experience for us and we’ll continue to work with great creators as we grow the channel.
This installment of YouTube Millionaires is brought to you by Epoxy, the premier company that helps multi-platform creators and digital networks distribute videos, engage with fans, measure success, and grow their communities across the social web. Check out Epoxy’s new Sharing Studio, a place for quickly creating and distributing native social content from your YouTube channels.
