Stars · music
Cortis Opened Smallest of 2025's Five Rookie Groups. A Year On It Outreads AHOF 15-to-1.
Five Korean groups debuted in 2025 under BigHit, SM, JYP, Starship and F&F. Ranked by English Wikipedia reads in their first 90 days, Cortis was fourth. Ranked by the last 30 days, it is first — and nothing about the opening predicted it.
Five Korean groups debuted in 2025, one each from BigHit, SM, JYP, Starship and F&F. If you had ranked them by English Wikipedia reads in their first three months, you would have had the order almost exactly backwards.
The opening
| Group | Label | Debut | Median daily reads, first 90 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hearts2Hearts | SM | 24 Feb 2025 | 840 |
| AHOF | F&F | 1 Jul 2025 | 700 |
| KickFlip | JYP | 20 Jan 2025 | 280 |
| Cortis | BigHit | 18 Aug 2025 | 231 |
| Idid | Starship | 15 Sep 2025 | 196 |
Hearts2Hearts opened more than four times above Cortis. AHOF opened three times above it.
A year later
| Group | Median daily reads, last 30 days | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Cortis | 2,196 | 9.51× |
| Hearts2Hearts | 912 | 1.09× |
| KickFlip | 189 | 0.68× |
| AHOF | 140 | 0.20× |
| Idid | 81 | 0.41× |
Fourth place became first. Cortis now reads 15.7 times AHOF and 27.1 times Idid — two groups that both started above it. AHOF fell to a fifth of its opening level; Idid to two fifths.
Only one group held roughly its opening ground: Hearts2Hearts, at 1.09 times.
The day each one peaked says the same thing
| Group | Best single day | Days after debut |
|---|---|---|
| Hearts2Hearts | 8,106 | 1 |
| Cortis | 6,788 | 104 |
| AHOF | 4,304 | 184 |
| Idid | 1,405 | 76 |
| KickFlip | 1,101 | 314 |
Hearts2Hearts had its biggest day the day after debuting and never beat it. Cortis had to wait three and a half months; KickFlip, ten. A debut-day number is a measure of how many people were told something was happening, not of how many came back.
What this does not tell you
A page view is a page opened. It is not a stream, a ticket or a vote, and English Wikipedia counts English-language readers only — a group that is read heavily in Korean may barely move here.
We also did not check what happened to any of these groups. A comeback, a drama cast list, a televised appearance and a controversy all look identical in a pageview series, and we did not match these curves against a news timeline. What we can say is narrow and, we think, useful: among these five, the first ninety days did not predict the twelfth month.
Wikimedia pageviews, en.wikipedia, all-access, user traffic only (bots excluded), daily, from each group’s debut to 4 September 2026; measured 5 September 2026. Medians, not means — one viral day would otherwise carry a whole quarter. Two groups in the same dataset debuted before our window and are left out rather than estimated.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Wikimedia — Pageviews per-article, en.wikipedia, all-access, user traffic only (bots excluded), daily, counted from each group's debut date to 4 September 2026 · https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/
- K Culture Wire — Our own rookie reading build (wikitip-rookie-reading.json), measured 5 September 2026
What we checked
- Median daily English Wikipedia reads, first 90 days after debut: Hearts2Hearts 840, AHOF 700, KickFlip 280, Cortis 231, Idid 196.
- Median daily reads over the last 30 days of the window: Cortis 2,196, Hearts2Hearts 912, KickFlip 189, AHOF 140, Idid 81.
- Ratio of last 30 days to first 90 days: Cortis 9.51×, Hearts2Hearts 1.09×, KickFlip 0.68×, Idid 0.41×, AHOF 0.20×.
- Cortis now reads 15.7 times AHOF's figure and 27.1 times Idid's. In the first 90 days it read below both.
- Single best day and how long after debut it fell: Hearts2Hearts 8,106 on day 1; Cortis 6,788 on day 104; AHOF 4,304 on day 184; Idid 1,405 on day 76; KickFlip 1,101 on day 314.
- Debut dates and labels: KickFlip 20 January 2025 (JYP), Hearts2Hearts 24 February 2025 (SM), AHOF 1 July 2025 (F&F), Cortis 18 August 2025 (BigHit), Idid 15 September 2025 (Starship).
What we left out, and why
- Tomorrow X Together and Enhypen, which are in the same dataset but debuted in 2019 and 2020. Our window does not reach their first 90 days, so that column is unmeasured for them and we are not filling it.
- YouTube views, streaming figures and chart positions. We did not count them and do not restate other outlets' numbers as our own.
- Readership inside Korea. English Wikipedia counts English-language readers; the Korean edition is a separate measurement we did not make here.
- Why any group's reading rose or fell — a comeback, a drama role, a controversy, an algorithm. Wikipedia records none of that and we did not match it against a news timeline.
Written from the same data
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