Mobile content makes money in Korea

The Inquisitor reports on two mobile media moguls in Korea. Their company DirectMedia is hugely succesful in the Korean mobile content market. The article is a bit sketchy on the why and how of the Korean market. The positive things are:

• that its DRM-free mostly, 
• short release periods for all content. (so the movie comes out this week, but you don't have to wait half a year for the mobile accessible version),
• 60% of music downloads are to mobile, compared to 15% elsewhere,
• they create new and original content for mobile as an extra next to the official movie/soap (can you imagine Heroes comic episodes? (GRMBL... I forgot to tape the new episodes of Heroes yesterday on BBC)
  
• the Telco invests in them and provides a billing platform. 
• and the killer, they don't see themselves as a content company, but as an applications company that provides multiple applications for users. Revenue share on content (b2c), operator fees for
  supplying the platform (b2b) and shared data charges on sporadic
  special events, such as a Korea Vs Japan Baseball game. Incidentally the only time
  their servers have gone down.
  

What I didn't get was the revenue that they have. $15 million is kind of bleak next to the "Crazy Frog" people who have $300-$500 million. Korea's country size is 49 million, so allowing for size of the US and EU markets, it might not be a very bad number, but it does sound lower.