Malaysia and Singapore share 78% of their Korean list

Take one week and two countries. Of all the Korean titles either of them held on a Netflix top 10 that week, what share was on both lists?

For Malaysia and Singapore the answer is 77.9%, across the 100 weeks in which both carried at least five Korean titles. It is the highest figure on the board, and the board has 4,179 country pairs on it.

The fifteen most alike pairs are all in one region

The next five are Indonesia–Philippines, Hong Kong–Singapore, Singapore–Taiwan, Philippines–Thailand and Singapore–Thailand. Every pair in the top fifteen is in Southeast or East Asia. Not one European, American or African pair appears.

The number that looks better and means less

We nearly published a different table. Rank the same 4,179 pairs using every week rather than only the weeks with five titles each, and this comes out on top:

Ninety-seven per cent is a much better number than seventy-eight, and it is worth almost nothing. Read the third column: in those weeks the smaller of the two countries had about one Korean title. When both countries have one Korean title and it is the same title — usually Squid Game — the overlap is 100%.

Agreement is cheap when there is almost nothing to agree about. Those figures are a fact about how little Korean content Nordic charts carry, not about how alike Denmark and Norway are. We are printing them here rather than leaving them out, because the gap between the two tables is the useful part: a similarity score with no size beside it can be made to say anything.

Only 45 of the 4,179 pairs clear the bar of twenty weeks with five Korean titles on each side. For the other 4,134 we report that we could not measure it.

Nowhere looks like Korea

The obvious comparison is Korea’s own chart, and it is the one that fails.

The closest any market gets to Korea’s own Korean list is 38% — half what Malaysia and Singapore share with each other. Korea’s chart is not the source that the others are copies of; it is its own list, and the region has a different one.

At the far end, the markets whose Korean list looks least like Korea’s are Ireland (3.2%), the United Kingdom (4.2%) and Ukraine (4.3%). In those markets one Korean title charts at a time, and it is rarely the one Korea is watching.

What this does not say

It does not say Malaysians and Singaporeans like the same shows. Netflix decides what is licensed where and when it is released, and two markets with the same release calendar will produce similar charts whatever anyone prefers. Two of the three things that make a chart are Netflix’s decisions.

It does not say anything about how many people watched. Netflix publishes the position, not the audience.

And it is not a ranking of countries. What is on the board is pairs, and a pair sits high on it mostly because both halves take a lot of Korean content in the same weeks. Every pair, including the ones we could not measure, is on the same-list page.