Hyun Bin took 34% of his show's peak. Song Kang-ho got 3.9%

On 17 February 2020, Crash Landing on You had its biggest day on English Wikipedia: 131,083 reads. The same day, Hyun Bin was read 44,880 times — 34.2% of the show’s figure.

On 10 February 2020, Parasite had its biggest day: 2,696,922 reads. The same day, Song Kang-ho — the most-read member of that cast — took 105,177, which is 3.9%.

Both are Korean breakouts. Both were the biggest thing in Korean culture in the same month. One of them handed a third of its attention to a person, and one handed less than a twenty-fifth.

The twelve

For each title we took its single biggest day on English Wikipedia, then measured every cast member with an English Wikipedia article on that same day, and kept whichever one was read most. We did not decide who the star was — the count did.

The relationship, and what it survives

Plotted against the log of the title’s peak, the share moves the other way: r = −0.678, with twelve titles. That gives t = −2.92 on 10 degrees of freedom, p ≈ 0.016 — inside the 0.05 line we hold ourselves to.

The bigger the title got, the less of it landed on any one person.

We are stating it that carefully on purpose. Twelve is a small number, and these twelve are titles we already knew had broken out — we did not draw them at random from all Korean releases. A relationship measured inside a set of winners does not tell you what happens to everything else.

Why the effect could be real anyway

There is a plain mechanism available, and it does not require anything mysterious.

A title that reaches 2.7 million reads in a day has reached far past the people who follow Korean film. Most of those readers arrived for the event — an Oscar, a phenomenon — and the event is the title. They look up the film and stop. A title at 60,000 reads has mostly been found by people already inside the audience, and those people go on to the cast page.

A wider audience is a shallower one. That is what a falling share looks like from the inside.

We cannot test that mechanism with this data, so we are offering it as a reading, not a finding. The finding is the number.

What this is useful for

If you want to know whether a Korean title made anyone famous, the title’s own peak is a poor guide — the biggest titles here converted the worst. Crash Landing on You was a twentieth of Parasite’s size and put nearly nine times the share onto its lead.

That is measurable, nobody publishes it, and it took twelve titles and 108 actors to say it with a number attached.

The same panel of actors, measured for reach rather than share, is on the actor-reach table; who appears alongside whom is on the casting page.