Korean pop culture, in numbers

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Agent Kim Charted in 81 Countries. It Was Number One in Fewer Than a Third of Them

Of the four titles we checked against Netflix's own weekly country tables, KPop Demon Hunters topped 76 of the 93 countries carrying it (81.7%). Agent Kim topped only 25 of 81 (30.9%).

The table this is written from: /what-moves-english-reading

#netflix#korea#method#distribution#variety

Four Korean Netflix titles carried in dozens of countries this year did not top the chart in most of them. One, Agent Kim, was carried in 81 countries and topped the chart in 25 of them — 30.9%, or 31% rounded.

What the numbers say

We read Netflix’s own weekly per-country Top 10 tables and counted, for each title, how many countries ever carried it against how many of those countries it ever reached number one in.

Title Countries carrying it Countries reaching #1 Share reaching #1
KPop Demon Hunters 93 76 81.7%
Teach You a Lesson 91 46 50.5%
Our Sticky Love 68 27 39.7%
Agent Kim 81 25 30.9%

Being carried widely and topping the chart widely are different things. KPop Demon Hunters did both — carried in 93 countries, number one in more than four out of five of them. Agent Kim was carried almost as broadly, 81 countries, but topped the chart in fewer than a third.

Why this matters for reading a headline

A press line describing a title as topping “the non-English chart” or “charts in dozens of countries” is describing reach, not dominance within that reach — and the two move independently. Teach You a Lesson and Our Sticky Love sit in between: carried nearly as widely as the two extremes, topping the chart in roughly half and roughly a third of those countries respectively.

What this can and cannot say

This is four titles chosen by how often they appeared in our own collection that week, not a random sample of Korean Netflix output, and it says nothing about why a widely carried title fails to top the chart in most of the places carrying it — release-week crowding, dubbing timelines, and genre fit could all play a role, and this count cannot separate them. What it does establish is that “carried in N countries” and “number one in N countries” are two different counts, and a title can score high on one while scoring low on the other.

More single-cause and multi-day spikes are tracked on our what-moves-english-reading hub.

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

Where these numbers come from

Sources

  • Netflix Top 10 (public, weekly, per-country tables) — archive/raw/netflix-top10/countries.ndjson, weekly country lists, 2021-07-04 to 2026-08-23. · https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/

What we checked

  • Titles chosen were the ones repeated most often in our own community and news collection for 2026-09-03 (664 items) — a frequency pick, not a hand pick.
  • KPop Demon Hunters: carried in 93 countries, number one in 76 (81.7%), over 62 weeks, reaching number one in South Korea for 32 of those weeks.
  • Teach You a Lesson: carried in 91 countries, number one in 46 (50.5%), over 12 weeks.
  • Our Sticky Love: carried in 68 countries, number one in 27 (39.7%), over 3 weeks.
  • Agent Kim: carried in 81 countries, number one in 25 (30.9%), over an unspecified week count in this snapshot.
  • Russia is excluded from all country counts (700 country-weeks removed) because its chart access differs from the rest of the panel.

What we left out, and why

  • Any global chart position. Netflix does not publish one; press lines describing a title as topping 'the non-English chart' describe a separate, single worldwide list this data does not contain.
  • Titles not in our own 664-item collection for the date checked. A title missing from this table was not checked, not disproven.
  • Any claim about why a title tops fewer countries than it reaches. That could be crowded release timing, dubbing availability, or genre fit — this count cannot separate them.

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 /what-moves-english-reading.

What a company sheet contains, and what it cannot tell you →

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