Korean pop culture, in numbers

Go Youn-jung tops two Southeast Asian Wikipedias, Lee Chae-min tops Indonesia and Moon Ga-young tops Malaysia

Four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, four lists of Korean actors. Is there one name at the top of all of them?

No. Four editions, 3 different names at the top: Go Youn-jung leads Vietnam (96.35) and Thailand (110.83), Lee Chae-min leads Indonesia (79.66), and Moon Ga-young leads Malaysia (25.02).

The music lists do not look like this

We measured Korean music acts the same way, over the same twelve months, with the same ranking code. There, 2 names take the four top places and exactly 1 name — BTS — appears on every list. Here it is 3 names at the top and 3 shared by all four.

Measured the same way over the same twelve months, the music lists and the actor lists have different shapes. One music act is first in three of the four editions and is the only name shared by all four. Among actors no name is first everywhere, and more than one name is shared by all four. We can show the difference; we did not measure what causes it.

The music tables are at who each country reads first.

Indonesia — the 10 most-read Korean actors

#NameReads per million
1Lee Chae-min79.66
2Byeon Woo-seok75.98
3Go Youn-jung65.88
4Kim Seon-ho53.85
5Cha Eun-woo51.85
6Im Yoon-ah48.75
7Park Ji-hoon46.55
8IU46.4
9Song Hye-kyo46.05
10Ji Chang-wook45.31

Vietnam — the 10 most-read Korean actors

#NameReads per million
1Go Youn-jung96.35
2T.O.P76.81
3IU68.06
4Kim Seon-ho60.86
5Bae Suzy60.81
6Byeon Woo-seok59.79
7Kim Ji-won59.4
8Cha Eun-woo55.8
9Jisoo53.13
10Ji Chang-wook48.97

Read here and nowhere else in this table: T.O.P, Kim Ji-won, Jisoo.

Thailand — the 10 most-read Korean actors

#NameReads per million
1Go Youn-jung110.83
2Byeon Woo-seok106.46
3Lee Chae-min98.8
4Im Yoon-ah96.6
5Kim Seon-ho91.8
6IU82.08
7Cha Eun-woo68.57
8Bae Suzy59.14
9Kim Woo-bin57.79
10Song Hye-kyo55.09

Read here and nowhere else in this table: Kim Woo-bin.

Malaysia — the 10 most-read Korean actors

#NameReads per million
1Moon Ga-young25.02
2Cha Eun-woo24.11
3Byeon Woo-seok21.63
4Sohee20.93
5Song Ji-hyo18.79
6Kim Jae-joong16.97
7Park Ji-hoon14.58
8Kim Seon-ho14.05
9Kim Sae-ron13.74
10Im Yoon-ah13.14

Read here and nowhere else in this table: Moon Ga-young, Sohee, Song Ji-hyo, Kim Jae-joong, Kim Sae-ron.

Byeon Woo-seok, Kim Seon-ho, Cha Eun-woo are on every list

Of the 40 places across the four tables, 3 names fill a place in all of them: Byeon Woo-seok, Kim Seon-ho, Cha Eun-woo. Not one of them is first in any of the four columns — the names at the top are Lee Chae-min, Go Youn-jung and Moon Ga-young, and none of those three is on every list. Travelling widely and topping a list are not the same thing here.

This is not a split between singers and actors

This is not every Korean celebrity. It is the cast of Korean titles that reached a Netflix country chart, which is the panel the rest of our data is built on. A singer or idol who never appeared in one of those titles is not here.

The panel is a cast list, so people who both sing and act are on it — IU, T.O.P and Jisoo appear in these tables and on the music page too. We are not claiming a clean line between the two, and the overlap is the reason the two pages can be compared at all.

What this page cannot tell you

Not popularity. An article is opened by fans, by people who just heard a name, and by people checking a fact.

Not a clean genre split. The panel is a cast list, so it holds idols who act and actors who sing.

Not why the shapes differ. We can show that the actor lists have no single leader while the music lists do, and we did not measure what produces that.

Reads — Wikimedia Pageviews API, human traffic only, 2025-08 through 2026-07, 12 months, human traffic only, expressed per million reads of that edition so a small Wikipedia is not penalised for being small. Cast and charting titles — Wikidata and Netflix country charts.

Entries arriving as a bare Wikidata identifier are dropped rather than printed as a name. On this panel there were 0.

Card set — free to share

Five cards, 1080×1350. Every figure on them is in the table on this page. Take them.

Card 1 of 5Card 2 of 5Card 3 of 5Card 4 of 5Card 5 of 5

Fourteen seconds, with sound

Fourteen seconds: the three actors at the top of four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, and the three names on every list that lead none of them. Free to repost with the address on it.

What we wrote from this data