What Is a Homma? Inside K-pop's Fansite Economy

You have seen the photographs. An airport, a walk into a building, a backstage corridor, a concert. The background falls away and the face stays sharp, like a magazine shoot.

Most of those were not taken by a news outlet. A fan took them. And that fan makes money from them.

At a glance

Those costs and prices come from Korean reporting published in 2019. Print costs and retail prices have both moved since. What has not moved is the structure — at small runs the cost is nearly the retail price, and margin only appears once the run passes about a hundred.

Start with the word homma

In Korea these people are called homma (홈마), a contraction of home master — as in homepage master. Back when personal websites and fan sites were the centre of Korean fandom, that meant whoever ran a given celebrity's site.

The meaning has since moved. The test is no longer whether you run a site but whether you shoot the artist yourself and supply the images. Within fandom they are also just called masters.

Two adjacent terms are easy to confuse.

Fandom distinguishes homma from sasaeng carefully. In practice the boundary is not always clean, and the later part of this article is about exactly that seam.

Why the lens has to be that big

Spotting a homma is easy. It is done by lens size.

The reason is simple: at an airport or a venue, you cannot get close. The face has to survive being shot from a distance, and a moving person in a dim indoor space has to come out sharp. Only a fast telephoto lens does both, and fast telephoto lenses are expensive.

A starting homma buys a high-end camera body, a telephoto lens and retouching software before anything else. That is not a small entry cost for a hobby — which means the motive to recoup it is built in from day one.

The unit economics of a slogan towel

This is where the culture gets unusual. Homma do not only give photographs away. They manufacture merchandise and sell it.

The table says one thing: volume is the entire business. Nine slogans leave you 500 won. A hundred leave you 1.11 million, because the unit cost drops by more than half. So a homma's scale is effectively the same number as their follower count — how many units you can move is your margin rate.

Homma with recognised names have been reported to earn tens of millions of won a year. One outlet described them as having become corporate in form, manufacturing and selling their own product lines.

Why slogans specifically

The fastest-turning item on the list is the slogan — the long fabric banner you see draped around necks and held up at concerts and fan meetings.

Three reasons it sells.

• You buy a new one every time. A lightstick lasts years; slogans get a new design every comeback and every tour
• Not having one is visible. In a room where most seats are holding the same cloth, the empty hands stand out
• It is cheap. Against the ticket price, 18,000 won is a rounding error

If the lightstick is the official merch the agency sells, the slogan is the unofficial merch fans sell to fans. Two markets overlap inside one venue, and nobody counts the second one. The margin on the official side is worked out in what a 40,000-won lightstick costs to make.

Three unresolved problems

But it is not all a good story. Three issues have been raised in Korea for years.

Image rights. A celebrity's likeness rights generally sit with their agency, and homma pay nothing for using them. They shoot without consent and turn the images into products. Yet agencies rarely act — because the images a homma produces increase the artist's visibility. The interests do not collide head-on, so nothing gets resolved.

Tax. It looks like private resale but functions as commerce. Operations have scaled without business registration or declared income, and the argument that this sits in a taxation blind spot has been made repeatedly.

Privacy. One industry comment captures the nature of the problem better than any summary.

"Forget image rights — when there is an overseas show, some homma buy their own business-class ticket, sit next to the artist and photograph them for the entire flight. It has caused difficulties more than once or twice."

Set that beside how airport fashion works and the picture completes itself. The agency encourages the shot, the star walks the gate in sponsored clothes and changes into their own on the plane. With a camera in the next seat, even the changing-out part disappears.

Buying a seat is not illegal. That is exactly what makes it hard to address.

It has reached university festivals

In recent years this has moved past airports and venues. As idols began performing at Korean university festivals, campuses became a new shooting location.

At one university festival in Incheon in May 2024, homma who were told to stop shooting responded by posting the face of the student who confronted them straight to social media. The person who owned the festival lost control of their own image at their own school.

Universities began responding with headcount limits. Sungkyunkwan University's humanities and social sciences campus capped outside admission to its festival at 2,000 people. Separating those who came to watch the stage from those who came to sell it was only possible at the gate.

What this means where you are

Homma occupy an ambiguous place in Korean fandom. They produce a large share of the images fandom consumes, and the artist's visibility grows because of it. They also keep standing on the line between image rights and privacy.

This structure is a miniature of the K-pop industry. Albums, photocards and lightsticks all sit in the same place. In fandom, affection and commerce are done with the same hand.

Read next

• A single piece of paper for 3 million won — what happens after the homma photo becomes a card
• 52.7% of the reason people buy albums is not the music — the object bought in pursuit of that card
• Why every brand in an airport photo is already labelled — the other side of the scene a homma shoots

Sources

• Money Today — the homma earning a large-company salary chasing idols (Korean)
• Sisaweek — how much does a homma actually make (Korean)
• Munhwa Ilbo — telephoto cameras have reached university festivals (Korean)
• CFE — how homma make money in the idol market (Korean)