Jay Park outreads 2PM and Lee Hye-ri outreads Girl's Day, in all four countries. BTS's members never outread BTS

Jay Park is read more often than 2PM in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. Lee Hye-ri is read more than Girl’s Day in all four. Mark Lee and Kai are both read more than SuperM in all three countries where SuperM has an article at all.

None of BTS’s members manage it. V, Jungkook, Kim Seok-jin, Suga, RM, J-Hope and Jimin are each read less than BTS in every one of the four countries.

What we did

We took the 60 most-read Korean soloists on the four Southeast Asian Wikipedias and read who they belong to from Wikidata’s member-of property. 43 belong to a group, 17 to none, and none were unreadable. Where both the person and their group have an article on the same edition, we put the two figures side by side.

That leaves 23 comparable pairs. Six of them go one way, thirteen the other, and four cannot make up their mind.

Each cell is member reads per million against group reads per million, on that edition. A dash means one of the two has no article there, so we do not compare — a missing article is not a zero.

Two people are in this table twice over, and pointing in opposite directions. Kai belongs to both SuperM and EXO: he outreads SuperM in all three countries where SuperM has an article, and he is read less than EXO in all four. Mark Lee is the same — above SuperM everywhere, above NCT Dream only in Indonesia. Which way a member points is a fact about the pair, not about the person, and we are not going to pick the flattering half of either row.

The four that change their mind at the border

These are the interesting rows, because a member who sits above their group in one country and below it in another is telling you something about the reader rather than about the act.

T.O.P clears BigBang on the Vietnamese Wikipedia by almost two to one — 76.81 against 38.70 — and sits below it on the other three. Lee Jun-ho and Jay Park are in the same group, and only one of them beats 2PM everywhere.

What this is not

It is not a contest, and the direction is not a ranking of fame. A member’s article and their group’s article answer different questions for a reader: one is “who is this person” and the other is “what is this act”. Somebody looking up a face they saw in a drama opens the person. Somebody who just heard a song opens the group. A person being opened more is not evidence that the person is better known.

We also read membership for the 60 most-read soloists and no further. That is a limit of cost, not of meaning — a member further down the list may behave differently, and we have not looked.

And reads are people opening an encyclopaedia article. Not streams, not sales, not affection.

One thing we had to fix first

Wikidata records some memberships twice. Mark Lee came back four times — SuperM twice and NCT Dream twice — which would have inflated the count of comparable pairs and put the same person in the table repeatedly. We collapsed duplicates so each person appears once per group. The count of 23 pairs is after that.

The full table, including the thirteen where the group leads everywhere, is on members and their groups.