K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

If your show travelled, do more people look you up?

Name: If your show travelled, do more people look you up?
Creator: K Culture Wire

This is a join of two tables we keep: which countries a Korean title charted in, and how often people opened its actors’ English Wikipedia pages. 979 actors appear in both.

If an actor’s title reached twenty countries, do more people look the actor up?

The raw gap is 3.09× — and most of it is size

How this is counted. Views are one actor’s English Wikipedia page views over 30 days. Reach is the largest number of countries any of that actor’s charting titles reached.

Charting titles	Actors	Best title under 20 countries	20+ countries	Ratio
All of them	979	548 actors · 1,542	431 actors · 4,759	3.09×
1	375	287 · 888	88 · 1,924	2.17×
2	204	125 · 2,438	79 · 2,919	1.2×
3–4	218	95 · 3,347	123 · 4,660	1.39×
5 or more	182	41 · 3,157	141 · 11,800	3.74×

An actor with more titles draws more lookups whatever those titles did, so the 3.09× in the top row is partly just a count of work. Inside a band the ratios fall to 1.2× and 1.39× — except the last row, which stays high.

The objection: is the last row recency?

Titles that reach many countries are disproportionately recent, and a recent title lifts lookups now. So we split every band again by whether the actor’s most recent charting week falls after 2025-08-01.

Charting titles	Last charted since 2025-08-01	Before that
1	2.37× · 46 vs 30 actors	1.94× · 241 vs 58 actors
2	0.68× · 34 vs 31 actors	1.23× · 91 vs 48 actors
3–4	1.36× · 38 vs 72 actors	1.32× · 57 vs 51 actors
5 or more	4.06× · 29 vs 122 actors	1.11× · 12 vs 19 actors

The objection takes the biggest number away. Among actors with 5 or more titles, reach is worth 4.06× if they charted recently and 1.11× if they did not. That is a statement about when they last worked, not about how far the work travelled.

What survives both controls is the first row. For actors with one charting title the ratio holds at 2.37× and 1.94× — a single title that travelled roughly doubles the lookups of a single title that did not.

Where we refuse to give a number

A ratio of two medians means nothing on twelve people, so any cell with fewer than 12 actors on either side is printed as too thin to say rather than as a figure. One cell in the table above even runs the other way; with cells this size that is what noise looks like, and we would rather show it than tidy it away.

What we wrote from this data

Actors whose show travelled draw 3× the lookups. Hold two things fixed and most of that disappears.
Across 979 Korean actors joined to Netflix's country charts, those with a title in 20+ countries draw 3.09× the median Wikipedia lookups. Match on how many titles they have and how recently they charted, and only one group keeps the gap.
9 August 2026

Where these numbers come from, and what they cannot answer

Netflix and Wikimedia — Netflix Top 10 (Tudum) weekly country lists joined to English Wikipedia page views (Wikimedia Pageviews API, human traffic) through Wikidata cast lists (P161) filtered to Korean citizenship (P27)
Views are attention, not liking. A page climbs for good news and bad. We report the count and never the reason. Views cover 30 days, 20260705~20260803.
The cast list has a known hole. ⚠ 국제 공동제작의 외국 배우는 P27 로 걸러진다. 국적이 안 적힌 한국 배우도 함께 빠진다.
Cast is attached to 635 of 901 titles. An actor whose only credits are on the other titles is absent here entirely.
Direction is not established. A widely travelling title may raise an actor’s profile, or a known actor may be cast in titles that travel. Nothing here separates those.

The most looked-up Korean actors · Where Korean titles gained and lost · How we count