South Korea's Jinju National Museum beats National Museum of Korea in YouTube subscribers with war history content

A captured scene from Jinju National Museums video titled So You Wanna Fire a Medium Mortar in Joseon Courtesy of Jinju National Museum — A captured scene from Jinju National Museum's video titled "So You Wanna Fire a Medium Mortar in Joseon?"/ Courtesy of Jinju National Museum

SEOUL, August 9 (AJP) - The Jinju National Museum has nearly reached 100,000 YouTube subscribers, surpassing the National Museum of Korea's subscriber count through its popular historical warfare content series "Hwaryeok Joseon" (Firepower Joseon).

The recent boom in Netflix's hit animated film "KPop Demon Hunters" portraying a duo of a tiger and a magpie from traditional Joseon Dynasty paintings has led to a surge of visitors to the National Museum of Korea, selling related goods.

Despite numbers of foreigners and animation fans streamlining to the National Museum of Korea, Jinju's museum still stands up to their central counterpart through YouTube contents.

The regional museum's YouTube channel had around 99,700 subscribers as of Saturday, exceeding the National Museum of Korea's roughly 61,700 subscribers.

Contributing to the increasing popularity, Jinju Museum boasts its "Hwaryeok Joseon" series launched on September 27, 2020, transforming complex Joseon Dynasty military history into accessible video content. The series has accumulated over 30 million cumulative views since its debut.

The content covers diverse historical periods across six seasons, from small firearms in Season 1 to comparative studies of East Asian weapons in the current Season 6. In a 113,000-view video uploaded on October 15 titled "So You Wanna Fire a Medium Mortar in Joseon?", skilled actors demonstrate how actual Joseon Dynasty mortars were loaded and fired.

The museum's subscriber base has grown 245-fold since the content launch, while total views increased by 1,286 times compared to pre-series numbers. About 9.4 percent of last year's 323,759 museum visitors, roughly 30,292 people, cited the YouTube series as their motivation for visiting.

Museum officials attributed their YouTube success in reinterpreting historical materials into digital content that the public can easily access and enjoy, rather than simple displays.

Kim Dong-young davekim0807@ajupress.com