68 weeks of fan votes, fifth place in lookups

On 10 September 2026 Korean entertainment outlets reported that BTS’s Jin had finished first in a weekly idol poll for the 68th consecutive week. Sixty-eight weeks is sixteen months of winning the same vote.

We hold a different count for the same seven people: how many times each member’s English Wikipedia article was opened over twelve months. It is a completely different question — a poll measures people who choose to vote, a pageview measures people who wanted to look something up — and the two disagree.

Twelve months of lookups, September 2025 to August 2026

The member who has won a poll every week for sixteen months is fifth here.

And now the part that matters more than the ranking

Look at the middle. Ranks three, four, five and six — RM, Jimin, Jin, Suga — are 711,190 · 706,366 · 670,861 · 664,049. From top to bottom of that block is 7.1%.

Seven per cent, across four people, over a year. That is not four positions. That is a cluster, and the ordinal numbers we printed beside it are doing more work than the data supports.

The two ends are different. V draws 2.33 times J-Hope. That gap is real and would survive most ways of cutting the window. The four in the middle would not.

Move the window one month and Jin moves

We also counted the most recent single month of the same window:

Jin is fourth here, not fifth, and RM drops from third to fifth. Nothing happened to anybody. We changed the length of the window.

So the honest reading of both tables is: two members are clearly looked up more than the other five, and the other five are not meaningfully ordered by this count.

One thing that nearly went out wrong

We asked the pageviews service for RM (rapper) and got 27,156 lookups. That is a plausible-looking number, and it would have put RM dead last by a factor of twenty.

RM (rapper) is a redirect. The article is RM (musician), and it has 711,190 — the number in the table above. The redirect count is only the people who arrived by typing that exact name. Suga and Jungkook had the same problem.

So the collector now resolves every title through its redirects before counting, and then asks whether the resolved article links to the BTS article at all — because a redirect can also land on a different person entirely. Both checks changed numbers in this table.

A cell being full is not the same as a cell being right.

What this does not tell you

Lookups are lookups. Someone who opens a member’s page might be a fan of ten years or somebody who saw a name in a headline five seconds ago, and this count cannot tell them apart. It is not streams, tickets, endorsements or votes.

The poll result itself is not in our data at all. We did not collect it and we are not licensed to republish it, so it sits at the top of this piece as something Korean outlets reported, and none of our arithmetic touches it. If the poll and our count disagree, that is not evidence that either is wrong — they are counting two different rooms of people.

And we did not measure why any of these numbers are what they are. Solo releases, acting roles, service periods and news cycles all move attention around, and we counted none of them.

The full table, both windows, and how each of the seven titles was resolved are on member-vs-group.

These are statistics, not you. This is not investment advice.