Why the fandom are still called “Unpaid Creators”

K-pop fandom culture has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Compared to other fandoms, it has strong cohesiveness and engages in various fandom activities, but its strong cohesiveness can also be expressed as closedness.

One of the reasons why K-pop entertainment companies are often criticized is that they use the cohesiveness and closedness of fandoms to encourage competition between fandoms or induce excessive duplicate purchases by randomly providing photocards and event attendance opportunities.

As the fandom economy grows, the volume of transactions between customers and customers (C2C, Customer to Customer) is increasing.
This change can be clearly seen by looking at the expansion of K-pop-related MD organizations on global e-commerce platforms.

However, there are cases where people use services that support C2C and make direct transactions without paying commissions or suffer fraud during direct transactions.

In addition, there are complaints about platforms that provide brokerage services, such as mediating the creations of creators called homema among fandoms or providing subway advertisements by purchasing points and voting by inducing competition among fandoms, because they induce additional spending.

Fans sometimes call themselves ATMs in this situation.