In Southeast Asia, a Korean record label is looked up more than Seoul
We measured 2,238 places in Korea against four Southeast Asian Wikipedias. YG Entertainment scores 111.47 and Seoul 106.54. Twelve companies out-read 520 cities and districts on the median. What this cannot see is a single restaurant.
YG Entertainment’s Wikipedia article was read more often across Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia over the past twelve months than Seoul’s was. 111.47 against 106.54, on a scale that divides each country’s count by the size of its own Wikipedia.
SM Entertainment sits at 86.69, above Busan. Between them, twelve Korean entertainment companies and agencies have a median reading of 1.55 — nearly five times the 0.33 median of the 520 Korean cities and districts we measured.
Seven kinds of place
| Kind | Places | Total per million | Median place |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cities and districts | 520 | 1,193.5 | 0.33 |
| Other | 559 | 976.5 | 0.15 |
| Companies and agencies | 12 | 235.7 | 1.55 |
| Palaces, temples and heritage | 53 | 167.3 | 0.23 |
| Stations | 879 | 106.5 | 0.09 |
| Islands, mountains and parks | 114 | 98.9 | 0.16 |
| Stadiums, museums and venues | 101 | 80.5 | 0.13 |
Split by country, cities land at 217.3 in Indonesia, 489.5 in Vietnam, 240.0 in Thailand and 246.8 in Malaysia. Companies land at 98.5, 73.0, 50.9 and 13.3 — the only group where Indonesia leads.
Stations are the largest group by count and nearly the smallest by reading: 879 of them together draw less than 53 heritage sites do. Companies are the mirror image — twelve entries, the highest median of any kind.
The four countries do not agree
| Top of that edition | |
|---|---|
| Indonesia | YG Entertainment, SM Entertainment, President of South Korea |
| Vietnam | Battle of Khe Sanh, President of South Korea, Seoul |
| Thailand | Seoul, President of South Korea, Korean (language) |
| Malaysia | Gyeongbokgung, Incheon, Busan |
Indonesia opens with two record labels. Malaysia opens with a palace. Vietnam’s most-read Korea-linked article is a 1968 battle its own history runs through, which is a reminder that “places in Korea” and “Korean culture” are not the same set.
Read the columns across rather than down. The same four countries that read K-pop groups more evenly than anything else, as we measured yesterday, do not read Korean places evenly at all.
What this cannot see
It cannot see a single restaurant or cafe. Wikipedia has articles on neighbourhoods, cities, palaces and stations; it has none on individual venues. So this measures which parts of Korea are looked up, not where anyone goes. A venue layer needs the Korea Tourism Organization’s API, which carries filming locations, restaurants and cafes with coordinates — and which requires a key we do not yet hold.
A read is curiosity, not a trip. It cannot say who came, only who looked. Arrival counts by nationality are published separately by the Korea Tourism Organization and are the right instrument for visits.
Of the places with an article in at least one of these editions, 2,238 could be measured and 49 could not; those are left out rather than counted as zero.
The Philippines is absent. The Tagalog Wikipedia is too small to measure with and Filipino readers largely use the English edition.
The full tables are at An entertainment company is looked up more than Seoul is.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Wikidata — Anything in South Korea with coordinates, with its article links in each language edition
- Wikimedia — Pageviews API, per-article and per-edition monthly reads, human traffic only, August 2025 to July 2026
The data behind this
Written from the same data
If you work in this business
Everything on this page is measured from the same weekly Netflix lists, per market and per title. We publish the pages free; what we sell is the same measurement cut to one company's catalogue — including the figures behind /places and /fame-compare.
What a company sheet contains, and what it cannot tell you →