Ma Dong-seok has 21 titles. Steven Yeun is read 2x more

Take every Korean actor Wikidata places in the cast of a title that has reached a Netflix Top 10 — 1,113 of them have English Wikipedia articles — and ask a simple question: does appearing in more of those titles mean more people look you up?

Yes, and the effect is large. It does not stop where we said it did.

From one title to ten-or-more, the median rises more than eightfold, and it rises at every step.

In August we published this table with a turn at the end: the ten-or-more band sat below the six-to-nine band, and we wrote that the effect stops. That band held twenty-three people then. It holds thirty-nine now, after three more weeks of chart data and after we fixed a spelling fault that had been dropping forty-four Korean titles from the set. The turn was the thin band, not the world. The old reading is kept in the correction note rather than deleted.

Across all 1,077 actors the rank correlation is 0.319 — real, and much weaker than the table alone suggests. Volume explains part of this and nothing like all of it.

The busiest people are not the most looked-up

Now the other end of the same panel:

Kim Eui-sung has fifteen charting titles and 5,098 views. Steven Yeun has one and 111,016 — more than twenty times as many. Both figures are correct and they are not in tension, because they measure different things: one is how much Korean screen work a person has done that travelled, the other is how many people typed their name into English Wikipedia in July.

The reading that survives is narrower than the headline table. Appearing in more hits raises the floor, not the ceiling. Working constantly moves an actor from 1,897 to 15,744 — from invisible to solidly present. It does not put anyone at the top. The top of this panel is held by people carrying something the panel cannot see: a career in English-language film, a place in a globally known group, a single show that broke out.

One title versus two

The cleanest cut in the data is not at ten. It is at two.

Two in five of the panel have appeared in exactly one Korean title that reached a Netflix Top 10, and that group holds a sixth of the attention. The median actor with two or more charting titles is looked up 3.21 times as often as the median actor with one.

Whether that is a second title creating attention or attention creating a second booking, this data cannot say, and neither can any dataset we can reach.

Three things this does not measure, and one we broke ourselves

It is not a filmography. A charting title means a Korean film or series that reached a Netflix Top 10 somewhere. An actor with thirty years of work shows 1 if only one of those works ever charted. Kim Eui-sung’s fifteen is fifteen charting titles, not fifteen credits.

It is not billing. Wikidata’s P161 records a cast member. A lead and a one-scene part are the same row. Many of the ten-or-more group are character actors who appear in everything and are read about far less than the leads beside them — which is why the band moved so much when sixteen more people entered it, and why its shape at twenty-three should not have been called a finding.

It is not popularity. Every figure counts openings of an English Wikipedia article over thirty days. Not tickets, not streams, not attention inside Korea.

And one gap is our own doing. Our collector stored how many charting titles each actor appeared in, and not which ones. So we can tell you that Roh Yoon-seo drew 66,356 views across three charting titles, and we cannot tell you which three. Every question that begins did this show move its cast is unanswerable from what we saved. We are fixing the collector to keep the link. The pageview history can be re-fetched at any time; the join we discarded has to be re-queried from scratch, which is the more expensive of the two mistakes and the one we made.

We would rather print that than report the count as though it were the whole story.

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More titles buys a floor. Does the kind of title matter as well as the count? Read what Korea’s own chart adds →