For real, why are K-Dramas so popular?

This is a serious question as I noticed how prominent korean media is over here even tho there are other countries like japan and china and so on. I originally thought most of the stuff here would be japanese lmao

Im not asking this because im annoyed (i wanna give k-dramas a try soon!), im just curious. 

I've watched a lot of kdrama, actually I've watched only kdrama for the last 2 years or so. I've also watched some jdrama and recently started watching cdrama. But over 95% is kdrama.

My impression is that kdrama is of superior quality usually than jdrama, jdrama lags waybehind kdrama, when I watch jdrama and feel like it is more than a decade behind kdrama in things like production quality. Simply put I feel like kdrama has more talent, not only actors but all the production staff, and even the music production. 

I haven't watched much cdrama, but my first impression is that.... there exists a lot of cheaply made cdrama that is not very interesting, but there exists also many epic high quality cdramas. I can see this from the ratings of cdrama on MDL, usually way lower than kdrama, but there are some epic series that are very high in rating.

But I totally agree with access. I wish though it was promoted better in the western world since it has already become very available but not very visible still. Take Netflix as an example, if you register a netflix account in the western world, the first screen you see will be full of american tv shows or content from your country/region. Korean content is not visible at all. It's only after you willfully search for a kdrama series and start training the Netflix recommendation engine that Netflix starts promoting korean series for you.

I stumbled upon kdrama series on Netflix almost by chance.... I decided to give it a try even though it was in korean because I wanted to watch some zombie series (Kingdom). After that I was more willing to try another korean series (Crash landing on you), and after that I just feel in love with kdrama.

I agree with kura2ninja, it's definitely availability.

When I first started watching Asian dramas, it seemed that J-dramas were the ones everyone talked about ("everyone" being a waaaay smaller fandom than it is now, back when you had to download everything you wanted to watch b/c streaming, legal or illegal, wasn't a thing). Actually it almost seemed like it was easier to find J-dramas, I think because there was some overlap between folks fansubbing anime (the only way to watch currently-airing anime because, again, streaming didn't exist) and fansubbing J-dramas. It seemed like K-dramas were almost harder to find subs for (if WITHS2 didn't pick up a drama, good luck finding subs!)

Streaming changed all that. Viewers nowadays are used to just being able to watch whatever they want on their TV with no effort-- which is great, don't get me wrong, but then they don't bother to seek anything that's not easily accessible (and there are a lot of great J-dramas that aren't available on Netflix & other legal streaming services, and probably will never be, because of how notoriously difficult and convoluted it is to license stuff from Japan).

This is a fun topic. While I agree that availability is a really important factor, marketability is important too. 

I was initially an manga/manhwa/web comics fan. I eventually wanted to see the anime adaptations of manga I really liked. If anime was not available (like with manhwas or Web comics), I would see the live adaptation. Sometimes, to prolong the experience, I would watch the live adaptation from different countries. 

What I came to notice about the Korean adaptations and K-dramas in general is that they seem to market to a more global audience. They invest more on production quality and hardware. Many titles are in English. The genres and plot lines are more  general. In short, Korean dramas are more "basic". I don't mean that in a bad way - you have to be well-known to even attain basic status. 

 ArniA:

The language was alien and the dialogs were fast,

To me, it sounded a bit like japanese, so I was confused first.Why do they say Konbanwa (good evening) and in subs it is written "thank you"? lol In reality they said "gomawo".  I think that I was lucky that my first kdrama was I'm not a robot, because its story hooked me from the start (when Kim Min Kyu went to that examination room... I thought: wow, what is it? I want to know more... And then that robots appeared, together with the cute humanoid robot and she did a reference to ET. I was captured with no way to escape. And then I watched other kdramas and got used to the language pretty fast. 

Chinese is closer to an alien language for me, even after many cdramas watched. :)

I think having dramas quality subbed in popular languages makes it easy to get into Korean dramas. I prefer watching Chinese dramas versus Korean dramas, but some Chinese dramas are not watchable (to me) due to unavailable or poor subtitles. It is hard to not find a Korean drama with good subtitles.