How Deema Abu Naser Launched A Career From Her Love Of K-Dramas

When Deema Abu Naser first began watching Korean dramas, her friends were not that receptive to her enthusiastic recommendations. She got comments that ranged from “What are you watching?” to “Deema, enough already, stop talking about it,” as well as “Let’s talk about something else. Gossip Girl is on this week.”

Today, Abu Naser runs the fan community DeemaLovesDrama on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok and has 315,000 followers. She recently left her day job to become a full-time creator, focusing on fan culture, Korean dramas and music, plus webtoons, books and anime. As well as becoming the first female reviewer to join the TikTok MENA (Middle East North Africa) Creators Hub, she became the first panelist to discuss Korean media at the 2023 Film and ComicCon held in Dubai. She also serves as an ambassador for brands such as Webtoon, Rakuten Viki and Notion. The 24-year-old discovered Korean dramas about 12 years ago, while exploring her interest in anime and Japanese dramas.

“I finished all the Japanese dramas I could possibly find and I found the Korean remake of a Japanese drama called Playful Kiss,” she said. “So I watched that and fell in love and continued watching k-dramas after that. I fell right down the rabbit hole.”

She first made a vlog after encountering the members of the Korean variety show Running Man in Dubai, but she was too shy to post it. Not finding a k-drama fan community in the United Arab Emirates, she hoped to meet more kindred spirits in Toronto, where she attended university, majoring in digital enterprise management with a minor in writing.

“It’s a multicultural university with tons of different environments, so I thought that I would find people who liked k-dramas and k-pop and I wouldn’t need to vlog about it,” said Abu Naser. “I could just talk to other people about it. But the same thing happened to me. No one I spoke to had any interest in them. In my final year of university I wanted to talk to people who liked the same TV, the same music as me, so I started DeemaLovesDrama.”

She began vlogging in December of 2019, but finding her audience was a gradual process that required mastering the subtleties of social media.

“From December to June I had maybe 200 subscribers on YouTube, even though I was making videos every week,” she said. “I had 100 followers on Instagram and 800 on TikTok and that stayed that way until June 2020. Covid hit in February, so I thought, okay, lets push through, it’s fine, but it was so sad in the beginning, because I thought it was going to work right away. Drama fans want to find each other online. There are not many of us, I thought, so this is going to go very quickly.”

Slow and steady was more like it. As she fine-tuned her videos, her fan base grew. The timing differed on each social media platform.

“On YouTube it kind of bloomed in June 2020,” said Abu Naser. “It’s Okay To Not Be Okay came out on Netflix then and I started doing reactions to that on YouTube. So, I went from 200 subscribers to 3,000 in a month. I decided to continue doing these reactions. On TikTok, it was gradual. It took me about two years to hit 100,000 followers.”

One of her followers asked if she could take a DeemaLovesDrama TikTok video and make it into an Instagram reel.

“I said, go ahead,” she said. “Good on you for even asking me, since people just take my content. Within three days of my TikTok on her Instagram, as a reel, I got one million views. I started posting some of my TikToks as Instagram reels. In the beginning of January I had 1,000 followers and by the end of January I had 10,000. A year later I have 135,000 followers.”

While it was not an overnight success story it does illustrate how quickly a social media following can grow once it reaches the right audience. Four years after starting DeemaLovesDrama Abu Naser still loves talking about k-dramas. What she continues to like about them is the creativity and imagination evident in every episode.

“The detail—down from the costumes and music—is so refined,” she said. “That by the end of the episode you feel like you’re in a different world.”

K-dramas have changed during the last few years, said Abu Naser. It’s partly due to the increased investment of international streaming platforms, such as Netflix, which launched in the UAE in 2016, the same year the company began producing original Korean content. Apple TV and Disney+, which now both produce original Korean content, launched there in 2019 and 2022 respectively.

“Some things are better, some things are worse or maybe just different,” said Abu Naser. “Previously instead of there being extreme physical intimacy from episode one it would take eight episodes until the characters were holding hands. Now with western production companies coming into the space everything has become much quicker. The pace of the dramas is much quicker, the storytelling is a bit more dramatic. There’s a lot in it that has changed. I would say the good thing is that now it’s more global. A lot more people watch k-dramas. They have a much bigger audience to watch even the older dramas, but something that I really miss is those feelings I had toward older dramas. Where the production was a little bit more toned down. And much more romantic.”

Netflix has 250,000 subscribers in the UAE and Korean content constitutes some of the most popular titles. Having released 29 k-dramas in 2022, the streaming platform recently announced it would again increase its investment in Asian content.

“It’s so popular now it’s actually crazy,” said Abu Naser. “I lived in Toronto for five years and I moved back to Dubai in Aug. 2021. Immediately, as I entered back into the country I saw that the Netflix top ten at that time included Hometown Cha Cha Cha. It was number one then and it was number one until it ended. Here, three to five of the top ten on Netflix are often k-dramas. When I lived in Toronto you would not find that many fans, but its a very big city in a very big country. So, everyone’s tastes are different. Here, because Dubai is a very small city, you can find k-drama fans everywhere and they have the same tastes. Whatever is trending they’ll watch.”

Her fan base, however, is not limited to the UAE. Her followers hail from the US, the UK, India, the Philippines, Malaysia and beyond. Abu Naser has a few k-drama projects in the works, which will hopefully result in more ways to connect with her followers. Her dream is to lead a tour of fans to k-drama sites in Korea. It would be ideal if some of those location sites were featured in her favorite dramas: 18 Again, Twenty-five Twenty-one, Alchemy of Souls, Reply 1988 and Flower of Evil.

“I would really, really love to show my followers where our favorite dramas were filmed,” she said.

With over 300,000 followers anything is possible.

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