Türkiye’s Creative Economy: TV-Series Exports, İKSV, the Istanbul Biennial and What Comes Next

Türkiye’s creative economy is an unusual case: a globally successful export industry built almost entirely by private broadcasters and producers, a cultural scene financed by family foundations, and a state that spends on heritage but has never adopted a creative-industries strategy. In this guide the Kurums Startup team sets out the figures from TÜİK, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the exporters’ associations and company sources, explains how the series business, the Istanbul art scene and the games sector work, and proposes a Türkiye-specific policy agenda. It belongs to our Arts & Creative Economy hub and should be read with the South Korea Hallyu playbook, the closest model for what Türkiye could become, and the UK creative industries playbook for the measurement and incentive architecture.

How big is Türkiye’s creative economy, and how is it measured?

Türkiye has no official creative-industries statistic on the UK or Korean model. The closest measure is TÜİK’s annual Cultural Economy release, which recorded ₺408.3bn of cultural expenditure in 2024, 0.9% of GDP, with 957,000 cultural workers and $9.9bn of cultural goods exports. Nominal growth of 83% reflects inflation as much as activity.

The TÜİK figures for 2024, published in December 2025, show general government cultural spending of ₺200.4bn (up 76.1%, with heritage the largest line at 17.7%) and household cultural spending of ₺203.8bn (up 91.5%, led by information-processing equipment at 25%, cultural services such as museums and concerts at 24.3% and books at 18.1%). The value added of cultural enterprises rose 73.9% to ₺188.6bn, led by printing and recorded media (20.7%), film, video, TV and music (13.1%) and architecture (11.6%). Cultural goods exports rose 8.1% to $9.88bn, 4.2% of goods exports, while cultural imports jumped 166% to $7.34bn; handicrafts and jewellery dominate both sides. Cultural employment grew 6.5% to 957,000, 47.8% of them women, with artisans the largest occupational group at 32.6%.

Two cautions apply. First, the TÜİK definition follows the Eurostat/UNESCO cultural framework, which includes jewellery manufacturing and handicrafts but excludes software, games and most advertising; on a UK-style “creative industries” definition Türkiye’s sector would be several times larger. Second, the nominal growth rates (83.3% in 2024, 84.7% in 2023) are dominated by inflation, which ran at 60.9% in 2024 and 32.9% in 2025 on IMF figures. In dollar terms the cultural economy grew from about $9.3bn in 2023 to $12.4bn in 2024, a real improvement, but one that starts from a low base: France’s narrow cultural measure is €54bn and the UK’s creative industries £146bn.

What TÜİK does not capture is the export of cultural services, above all television. Series exports are classified as services and tracked by the Service Exporters’ Association (HİB) under the Turkish Exporters Assembly (TİM), not in the cultural goods figure. Putting the goods and services numbers together, Türkiye’s cultural exports are in the region of $10.5bn a year, roughly 2.5% of total exports of $397bn in 2025.

How did Turkish TV series become the world’s second-largest drama export?

Through a private broadcasting market that produced long, cheap, emotionally legible dramas for domestic prime time, which Middle Eastern, Balkan and Latin American channels bought at low per-hour prices from the mid-2000s and streamers from 2018. No state export programme existed; distributors such as Global Agency, Calinos and Inter Medya built the market.

The timeline is well documented. Aşk-ı Memnu was sold to France in 1981 and Çalıkuşu aired in the Soviet Union in 1986, but the modern wave began with Gümüş, whose Arabic-dubbed finale on MBC drew 85 million viewers in August 2008. Over the following decade Turkish series overtook Mexican and Brazilian telenovelas across the Middle East, the Balkans and Latin America, then Pakistan (where Aşk-ı Memnu’s finale drew over 90 million), Spain (where Sadakatsiz and Kızım averaged above 2.3 million on Antena 3) and the US Hispanic market (Kara Sevda averaged over 2 million on Univision). Export revenue was reported at $350m in 2017 and the Television Exporters Association predicted it would pass $1bn by 2023.

It did not quite get there. Türkiye Today’s May 2024 report, citing Global Agency’s İzzet Pinto and HİB’s Fatih Aksoy, put revenue at $680m in 2023 across nearly 170 countries, with a target of $800m for 2024 and annual output of 60-70 series. A September 2025 report on the Beijing Culture Forum launch cited exports exceeding $500m in 2024 on more than 300 productions sold to over 150 countries, rising towards 200 through digital platforms, with an estimated billion unique viewers. The figures are industry estimates rather than official statistics and differ by source; the honest summary is $500m-$700m a year, second in the world by volume behind the United States and ahead of South Korea’s broadcasting exports of $1.26bn only if the latter are measured differently.

The economics explain both the success and the ceiling. Turkish series are long (120-150 minutes an episode, 30-40 episodes a season), which means a single season provides hundreds of hours of programming that can be re-cut into 45-minute episodes for foreign markets. Production cost per episode was about $200,000 in 2016; by 2024 it had risen to ₺4.5m and, for major series, up to ₺25m (about $516,000) according to a report cited by Türkiye Today in October 2026. Sale prices per episode abroad are typically in the thousands to low tens of thousands of dollars, with complete series selling for $78,000 to $520,000 for the best-known titles. The volume is huge; the per-hour value is small. That is the structural difference from Korean drama, which sells to Netflix at budgets of $1m-$3m an episode.

What has streaming done to the Turkish screen sector?

Streaming brought global distribution and higher budgets but shrank the free-to-air model that built the industry. Netflix launched in Türkiye in 2016, released its first Turkish original (The Protector) in 2018 and has produced over 80 domestic titles; meanwhile the number of dramas on Turkish TV has fallen roughly 40% in three years as costs climbed and television’s ad share fell to about 18%.

Netflix marked its tenth year in Türkiye in 2026 with a festival across Izmir, Istanbul and Ankara and a count of over 80 domestic stories released globally, from The Protector, Ethos (Bir Başkadır), The Gift (Atiye) and Rise of Empires: Ottoman to The Club (Kulüp), which ranked eighth on Netflix’s global non-English series chart in November 2021, and the 2026 adaptation of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. Netflix opened an Istanbul office, has described itself as the only platform buying Turkish series in volume, and has not published a Türkiye investment figure comparable to its $2.5bn Korean commitment. Disney+ entered in 2022 and cut back local production in 2024; Amazon Prime Video and the domestic platforms Exxen, Gain, BluTV (acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery in 2023) and TOD compete for a market of roughly 10 million streaming households.

The effect on the industry is double-edged. Streaming budgets are higher per episode and formats are shorter (8-10 episodes of 45-60 minutes), which suits international sales and professionalises production. But the traditional model depended on advertising-funded free-to-air channels commissioning 60-70 long series a year, and that model is in retreat. Türkiye Today reported in October 2026 that drama output on Turkish TV had fallen by about 40% over three years as production costs rose with inflation and actor salaries, advertising migrated to digital, and Middle Eastern buyers prioritised their own productions. Producers quoted in the report described an industry caught between a shrinking domestic commissioner base and streamers that commission selectively.

The structural answer, visible in Korea’s experience, is to move value capture up the chain: own IP, sell to multiple platforms, and build a domestic production-finance market. Türkiye’s producers (Ay Yapım, Tims&B, OGM Pictures, Medyapım, O3 Medya, Bozdağ Film, whose Istanbul studio lots now host tourism visits) are among the most experienced in the world at making drama at scale and at pace; what they lack is a financing and policy layer. For the general mechanics of how screen value chains shifted, see our article on streaming versus theatrical.

How does İKSV and the Istanbul Biennial model work?

İKSV, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, was founded in 1973 by a group of seventeen businesspeople led by Nejat Eczacıbaşı and runs the city’s main festivals and biennials on sponsorship, ticketing and patron income with limited public funding. Its Istanbul Biennial, held since 1987, is sponsored by Koç Holding through 2036 and is free to the public.

İKSV’s portfolio is the backbone of Istanbul’s cultural calendar: the Istanbul Film Festival (since 1982, the country’s largest), the Istanbul Music Festival, the Istanbul Jazz Festival, the Istanbul Theatre Festival, Filmekimi, the Istanbul Design Biennial and the Istanbul Biennial, plus the Salon İKSV venue in its Nejat Eczacıbaşı Building in Beyoğlu and the Pavilion of Türkiye at the Venice Biennale, which it coordinates. The foundation’s model is a Turkish version of the US non-profit: a board drawn from leading business families, multi-year corporate sponsorships, an individual patronage programme and ticket income, with public money confined to specific projects. This is the inverse of the French model, where the state is the principal funder, and closer to the Gulf model only in the sense that a small number of patrons decide.

The Istanbul Biennial, run by İKSV, is the flagship. The 18th edition, titled “The Three-Legged Cat” and curated by the Beirut-based curator Christine Tohmé, opened on 17 September 2025 with a public run from 20 September to 23 November across eight venues in the Beyoğlu-Karaköy district, in a three-phase structure planned to run to 2027; Koç Holding chairman Ömer Koç used the opening to reaffirm the sponsorship, which has run since 2007 and extends to 2036. The 19th edition, curated by Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, is scheduled for 18 September to 14 November 2027 with Artistanbul Feshane as its main venue. The biennial does not publish audited visitor figures, but previous editions have reported attendance in the hundreds of thousands, and it is the single event that places Istanbul on the international contemporary-art circuit alongside Venice, São Paulo and Sharjah.

Around İKSV sits a network of family-funded institutions: Istanbul Modern (Eczacıbaşı, reopened in a Renzo Piano building in 2023), the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Arter and the Vehbi Koç Foundation’s cultural programme, the Pera Museum (Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation), the Museum of Innocence (Orhan Pamuk) and a commercial gallery scene around Karaköy and Dolapdere. Contemporary Istanbul, the art fair, and the Istanbul Design Biennial complete the calendar. The strength of the model is independence from political cycles; its weakness is dependence on a handful of families and the absence of a tax framework (no Art Bonus or mécénat deduction) that would widen the donor base. Our analysis of corporate sponsorship of museums looks at how such partnerships are structured.

What about games, music, design and heritage tourism?

Games are Türkiye’s fastest-growing creative export, built on Istanbul’s mobile-studio cluster (Peak, Dream Games, Good Job Games, Rollic) that attracted multi-billion-dollar acquisitions; music streaming and live events are recovering; design and architecture serve the Gulf; and heritage tourism, with 52.6 million foreign visitors and $61.1bn of tourism revenue in 2024, is the largest cultural-adjacent earner.

The games story began with Zynga’s $1.8bn acquisition of Peak Games in 2020 and Rollic for up to $180m the same year, followed by Dream Games raising at a $2.75bn valuation in 2022 on the strength of Royal Match, which became one of the world’s highest-grossing mobile puzzle games. Istanbul now hosts dozens of hyper-casual and casual studios, a venture ecosystem built around their alumni, and public support through the Ministry of Industry’s TÜBİTAK grants and Technopark tax exemptions, which apply to software development and therefore to games. Because TÜİK’s cultural statistic excludes software, this success is invisible in the official cultural economy figure, which is one reason a creative-industries definition matters.

Music and live events were hit hard by the 2021-23 currency collapse and inflation, which priced international touring acts out of the market and pushed domestic ticket prices up. Recovery since 2024 has been led by festivals and arena shows in Istanbul and by streaming income on Spotify, where Turkish-language catalogue has a large diaspora audience in Germany and the Netherlands. Design, architecture and events are a quiet export success: Turkish architecture firms, exhibition builders and event producers are prominent suppliers to the Gulf build-out described in our Gulf creative economy article.

Heritage is where the state spends. Public cultural outlays of ₺200bn in 2024 went first to heritage (17.7%), reflecting the restoration programmes of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the museum network run by the Directorate General of Cultural Heritage and Museums, including the 2023-24 opening of the night museum programme, the new Troy, Göbeklitepe and Ephesus facilities, and the conversion of Hagia Sophia’s upper galleries to paid entry for foreign visitors (around 3 million a year). With 52.6 million foreign arrivals and $61.1bn of tourism revenue in 2024, Türkiye was the fourth most visited country in the world; cultural sites are a large share of the reason, though the ministry does not publish a cultural-tourism breakdown comparable to Italy’s museum revenue figures.

How does Türkiye compare with the UK, Korea, France, Italy and the Gulf?

Türkiye has Korea’s export instinct without Korea’s public finance, Italy’s private patronage without Italy’s tax credit, the UK’s production skill without the UK’s incentive and statistics layer, and a heritage estate to rival France’s with a fraction of the museum revenue. The gaps are institutional, not creative.

The comparison shows that Türkiye’s deficits are in the cheapest parts of the policy stack. A creative-industries statistic costs a statistical office a few staff. An export agency on the KOCCA model costs tens of millions of dollars a year, not billions. A patronage tax credit costs revenue only when donations happen. The expensive items, a screen tax credit and a levy-funded audiovisual fund, are self-limiting because they follow private spending. None of these require Gulf-scale capital; they require a decision that creative industries are an economic sector rather than a cultural ministry’s concern.

Korea is the most relevant precedent because its starting point in 1998 was similar: a private, domestically oriented content industry with early export success, a currency crisis, and a government looking for non-industrial growth sectors. Korea’s content exports were under $1bn then; they are $14.9bn now. Türkiye’s are roughly $10bn across goods and services, concentrated in low-value categories. The difference over 25 years was consistent, modest public finance and a decision to measure and target the sector.

What should a Türkiye creative-industries policy contain?

Seven measures, in rough order of cost: an official creative-industries statistic; a content export agency; a screen tax credit for series and film with a cultural test; a levy-funded audiovisual fund with streamer investment obligations; a patronage tax credit; museum autonomy with retained ticket income; and a creative-sector venture fund of funds. Together they would cost less than one Gulf giga-project.

1. Define and measure. TÜİK should publish an annual Creative Industries Economic Estimate on the DCMS nine-sub-sector pattern, covering advertising, architecture, crafts, design, film and TV, games and software, music and performing arts, publishing, and museums and galleries, with GVA, employment and exports, including services exports from HİB data. Until the games cluster, the series exporters and the architecture firms appear in one number, no ministry will own the sector and no Treasury official will defend an incentive for it.

2. Create a content export agency. A Türkiye Creative Content Agency, modelled on KOCCA and housed under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism or the Ministry of Trade, with offices in Madrid, Dubai, Mexico City and Jakarta, a dubbing and subtitling subsidy, and funding for MIPCOM, Content Americas and the Istanbul series fair launched in 2025. Budget: in the tens of millions of dollars. The exporters’ association already does part of this with no public money; formalising and funding it is the quickest win.

3. Introduce a screen expenditure credit. A refundable credit of 25-35% of qualifying Turkish spend on series, film, animation and games, administered by the Revenue Administration with a cultural test run by the ministry’s cinema directorate, open to foreign productions shooting in Türkiye and to domestic series sold abroad. The existing ministry support schemes, including the foreign film production support, are a start but are budget-capped and discretionary; the UK’s lesson is that producers commit to a jurisdiction when the credit is statutory, uncapped and paid on time. The fiscal cost is bounded because it follows private investment, and the alternative, watching production migrate to cheaper or better-incentivised markets, costs more.

4. Build a levy-funded audiovisual fund. On the CNC model: a small levy on broadcasters, pay-TV, streaming platforms and cinema tickets, pooled in a fund independent of the annual budget, with investment obligations for Netflix, Disney+, Amazon and domestic platforms to spend a share of Turkish revenue on Turkish works and retain a share of rights for producers. This is the mechanism that would shift value from platforms to producers and replace the collapsing free-to-air commissioning base. Türkiye already regulates platforms through RTÜK licensing; the fund is a financing layer on top of that.

5. Adopt a patronage tax credit. An Art Bonus-style credit of 50-65% on donations to museums, performing-arts institutions, festivals and heritage restoration, capped per donor, with a public register. Türkiye’s private cultural sector is unusually strong for a country of its income level, but it rests on five or six families. A credit would bring in mid-sized companies, professional firms and the diaspora, and would make İKSV-type institutions less exposed to any single sponsor’s fortunes.

6. Give major museums autonomy. Convert the ten largest state museums and archaeological sites (Topkapı, Hagia Sophia, Ephesus, Göbeklitepe, Troy, Cappadocia’s Göreme, Pamukkale-Hierapolis, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, Anatolian Civilisations, Zeugma) into autonomous institutions with appointed directors, retained ticket income and their own boards, on the Italian 2014 pattern. Italy’s state museums raised revenue 23% in a single year and reinvested it; Türkiye’s sites, with comparable visitor numbers, return their income to a central revolving fund.

7. Fund the private side. A creative-sector fund of funds, co-investing with private venture capital in games, production companies, fan-tech and music platforms, on the Korean pattern (Korea’s pool is 731.8bn won in 2026). Türkiye’s games cluster has already shown that venture-backed creative companies can reach billion-dollar exits; the production and music sides have no equivalent capital base. Our Venture Capital hub covers how such instruments are structured.

Sequencing matters. Measures 1, 2 and 5 can be done within a budget year and signal intent. Measure 3 needs primary legislation and a cultural test and takes 18-24 months. Measures 4 and 6 are institutional reforms that need two to three years. Measure 7 can be launched through the existing Development and Investment Bank or TÜBİTAK structures. The whole package is affordable: the UK’s £2.45bn of annual screen credits is the upper bound for a sector ten times Türkiye’s size, and Korea’s entire 2026 content budget is about $1.1bn.

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