Korea's culture data: 80% free, 76% not updated in a year
Korea runs a public platform holding 1,344 culture datasets — tourism, leisure, K-pop audiences. We counted every listing. Most cost nothing. Only 322 have been updated in the last twelve months.
The table this is written from: /korea-culture-data-market
Korea publishes culture data — tourism flows, leisure spending, the culture industry, overseas Hallyu audiences — on a public platform. There are 1,344 datasets on it, and most of them are free.
That is the sentence you will find if anyone describes it at all. Here is the one that goes with it.
What it costs
| Free | 1,075 | 80% |
| Paid | 239 | 17.8% |
| Price on request | 30 | 2.2% |
When it was last touched
| Updated within twelve months | 322 | 24% |
| Not updated in twelve months | 1,022 | 76% |
| Update date unreadable | 0 | 0% |
Every listing carried a readable date, so none of this is guesswork about age.
Free and live are not the same thing. Four datasets in five cost nothing; three in four have not moved in a year. Printing the first figure without the second is how a catalogue gets described as a resource.
The platform says so itself
| Stated update cycle | Datasets |
|---|---|
| Cannot be updated (갱신불가) | 590 |
| Yearly | 273 |
| No fixed cycle (비주기) | 257 |
| Monthly | 110 |
| Quarterly | 82 |
| Half-yearly | 21 |
590 datasets — 43.9% — are labelled as unable to be updated at all. That is often the honest label for a one-off survey rather than a failing, and we read it that way. It does mean nobody should reach here for a question about this month.
What they are about
Tourism 436 · leisure 338 · culture industry 318 · travel 266 · sport 244 · arts 232 · local 207 · culture consumption 191. One dataset can carry several tags.
Almost all of it is CSV — 1,299 of 1,344 — with 263 also offering JSON.
The one that matters to readers of this site
The oldest listings have been sitting still for six years. Among them:
| Dataset (portal name, as listed) | Last updated | Months ago |
|---|---|---|
| 지역별 청소년활동 관심지도 (a map of youth-activity interest by region) | 2020-06-22 | 74.5 |
| 베트남의 한류(K-POP) 주제 한류 커뮤니티 키워드 데이터 (Hallyu community keywords in Vietnam) | 2020-07-01 | 74.2 |
| 케이스타라이브의 국가별 월별 순 방문자 데이터 (KStarLive monthly unique visitors by country) | 2020-07-01 | 74.2 |
The second one is a Korean dataset about Vietnamese K-pop community keywords, and it stopped in July 2020. Anyone reaching for official Korean data on overseas Hallyu audiences will find a shelf that ends before the last several years of it — which is a large part of why we measure that audience ourselves, from Wikipedia, one language at a time.
What this is not
It is not a criticism of any dataset. We count what the listing says about each one, not what is inside it, and a survey of 2019 is supposed to stop in 2019. It is also one shelf, not the whole library — Korean data exists in many other places.
The full tables — every price band, cycle, format and tag — are here.
Counted from a listing archived on 4 September 2026. We do not host or republish any dataset.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Culture Big Data Platform (문화빅데이터플랫폼) — Full dataset listing, archived 2026-09-04 and read row by row. We publish counts made from the listing, not the datasets · https://www.bigdata-culture.kr/
What we checked
- Our count of 1,344 matches the total the platform states for itself, so nothing was missed in the fetch
- Every listing carried a readable last-updated date, so no dataset is called stale on a guess. Had any date been unreadable it would be counted separately, never as stale
- A price band we did not recognise is counted as unknown rather than folded into free. There were none, which is why the 80% figure can be stated plainly
- We do not republish any dataset. A few titles are quoted as examples and nothing else leaves the platform
- An old dataset about an old year is doing its job. Age is reported as age, not as failure
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 /korea-culture-data-market and /netflix-tudum-data-dictionary.
What a company sheet contains, and what it cannot tell you →