K-pop groups are the most evenly read Korean names in Southeast Asia

A Korean name read equally in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia would have 25% of its reading in each. None do. The question is which come close.

K-pop groups come closest: a median of 41.7% of their four-country reading sits in their largest single country. Actors follow at 42.1%, solo musicians at 42.8%, brands at 45.3%, footballers at 50.4%. Korean football managers sit at 92.4% — each is read in the country that hired him, which we measured separately last week.

Names below 10 reads per million are counted in the panel but left out of the median, because at that size the concentration figure swings on a handful of views.

The bottom row is not a finding

Esports players sit at 100%, which reads as the most nationally confined group in the data. It is not that.

Of the 14 esports players above the threshold, 13 have an article in the Vietnamese Wikipedia and in none of the other three editions here. Their concentration is 100% because there is nowhere else for reading to go. Faker is the exception — he has Vietnamese, Thai and Malay articles, and lands at 95%.

That row is a gap in the encyclopaedias, not a gap in attention. We publish it in the table because removing an inconvenient row is worse than explaining it, but it should not be read as a fact about Southeast Asian esports.

The footballers’ 50.4% is the honest sporting figure, and it comes from only ten names clearing the threshold out of 807 in the panel. Korean football has a very short head here.

Read almost equally in all four

These sit within three points of the even floor. None of them is at the top of the reading tables — evenness and size are different questions, and a name can score well on one while sitting mid-table on the other.

What concentration cannot say

It says where reading sits, not how much of it there is. A name read evenly and rarely scores the same as one read evenly and widely, which is why the totals stay in the tables alongside.

And where a name has an article in only one edition, its concentration is fixed at 100% by that fact alone. That is the trap the esports row fell into, and it is worth checking for in any row near the extreme.

The Philippines is absent throughout. The Tagalog Wikipedia is too small to measure with and Filipino readers largely use the English edition, so there is no honest number to publish.

The full tables are at What gets read across Southeast Asia, and what gets read in one country.