Cortis passed 100m views today. English readers had already arrived
Of the five K-pop groups that debuted in 2025, Cortis is the only one read more in English now than in its first months — 2,196 readers a day against 231. Three of the other four are read less than they were at debut.
The table this is written from: /rookie-reading
Cortis’s music video for “FaSHioN” passed 100 million views on YouTube at about 4am Korean time this morning, roughly a year after its release. That number is YouTube’s, not ours, and we have no way to audit it.
We hold a different number, and it says something the view count does not.
What we count
Every reading figure we publish comes from one place: how many people opened an English Wikipedia page on a given day. It is a narrow measure and we say so on every page that uses it. But it has one property that matters here — it is recorded daily, from the day an article exists, for every group alike. So we can ask a question the milestone cannot answer:
Of the groups that debuted alongside Cortis, how many are read more in English now than they were at the start?
One of five
| Group | Debuted | First 90 days | Last 30 days | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cortis | 2025-08-18 | 231 | 2,196 | 9.5x |
| Hearts2Hearts | 2025-02-24 | 840 | 912 | 1.1x |
| KickFlip | 2025-01-20 | 280 | 189 | 0.7x |
| Idid | 2025-09-15 | 196 | 81 | 0.4x |
| AHOF | 2025-07-01 | 700 | 140 | 0.2x |
Readers a day, median. The full axis, with the established groups as a ruler, is here.
Cortis started smaller than three of the four. In its first three months it drew 231 English readers on an ordinary day — fewer than Hearts2Hearts, fewer than AHOF, fewer than KickFlip. It is now read about ten times as often as it was then, and more than any of them.
None of the other four did that. Hearts2Hearts holds roughly the audience it opened with. KickFlip, Idid and AHOF are each read less on an ordinary day now than in their first months — AHOF at a fifth of where it began.
That is worth stating plainly, because it inverts the usual assumption: for most groups the debut months are the peak of English-language attention, not the beginning of a climb. The debut is when the coverage happens. What follows is usually a decline.
Why the milestone is the wrong place to look
A view count is cumulative. It can only go up, and it goes up fastest for whoever is already largest. It cannot tell you whether the audience is still arriving or arrived a year ago and stopped.
Daily reading can fall, and for four of these five groups it did. That is what makes it useful. Cortis’s 100 million is the visible result of an audience that had already been building for months — by our count the climb is well over a year old, and today’s number is a receipt for it rather than a cause of it.
What we cannot say
We cannot say the milestone moved anything, because we cannot measure today yet. Wikimedia fills its counts in about a day late, so 5 September is not in our data — absent, not zero. We have marked the date and will be able to look at it later this week.
We also cannot say why any group’s biggest day was its biggest day. Three of the five — Cortis, KickFlip and Idid — each peaked on the same date, 29 November 2025. A shared date suggests a shared event. Naming that event would be a guess, and we do not publish guesses as findings.
And we cannot see any group that has no English Wikipedia article at all. Three in four Korean singers do not have one, and none of them can appear in a table like the one above.
This is a statistic, not a verdict on anyone’s career. It counts people who opened an encyclopedia page in English, which is one narrow slice of an audience, and it says nothing about how any of these groups are doing in Korea.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Wikimedia — Pageviews API, en.wikipedia, all-access, user agents only (bots excluded), daily, 2025-01-01 to 2026-09-04, per article title · https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/
- Wikipedia — REST summary endpoint, used to confirm each title resolves to the group itself and not to a label, an album or a similarly named page · https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
- Soompi — Report that the FaSHioN music video passed 100 million YouTube views at about 04:00 KST on 2026-09-05. We did not count those views ourselves and do not treat the figure as ours · https://www.soompi.com/article/1868229wpp/cortiss-fashion-becomes-their-1st-mv-to-hit-100-million-views
What we checked
- The YouTube figure is not our measurement and is not used in any calculation here. It is the occasion for the piece, not evidence in it
- Medians, not averages. Cortis's single biggest day is 6,788 reads against an ordinary 2,196; an average would carry that day into every comparison
- Every debut date was read from the group's own English Wikipedia article, not from our notes. Three of our five were wrong on the first pass — AHOF and Idid had the wrong debut date and KickFlip's title pointed at JYP Entertainment's company page. All three were corrected before publication
- Each title is checked against Wikipedia's own one-line description before its reads are counted, so a company or album page cannot be counted as a group
- Today's and yesterday's counts are absent, not zero. Wikimedia fills them in about a day late, so the milestone day itself is not measured here
- This measures English-language reading only. It is not a measure of popularity in Korea, of streaming, or of sales, and a group with a thin English article will read low for that reason alone
The data behind this
Written from the same data
Take this away — 10 cards
The figures in this article, as images. Free to repost with the address on them.
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 /rookie-reading and /cannot-see.
What a company sheet contains, and what it cannot tell you →