NewJeans' Minji Won Today's Fan Vote. Red Velvet's Irene Draws More English Wikipedia Reading.
STARPOLL's 16 September vote put NewJeans' Minji first among female idols, Irene third. Irene's English Wikipedia reading ran 1.14x Minji's over the 30 days ending the day before the vote.
The table this is written from: /what-moves-english-reading
STARPOLL is a fan-voting app run by STARNEWS, official partner of the AAA 2026 awards. Its public leaderboard, “Star Ranking,” updates continuously and is visible without logging in — only casting a vote requires an account. On 16 September 2026, its Female Idol category read: Minji (NewJeans) first with 18,270 votes, Haerin (NewJeans) second with 15,716, and Red Velvet’s Irene third with 14,811.
A fan vote counts people motivated to vote, repeatedly, for a name. It is not a measurement of how many people look that name up. We hold a different number for that: English Wikipedia pageviews, which we’ve used all year to check reported K-pop news against actual reading. So we checked whether the two numbers agree on who’s “first.”
They don’t.
What we measured
We pulled 30 days of daily English Wikipedia pageviews (17 August-15 September 2026, the day before the vote snapshot) for every name in STARPOLL’s top five we could match to an individual page.
| STARPOLL vote (16 Sep) | Vote rank | 30-day Wikipedia total | 30-day rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minji | 18,270 | 1 | 10,786 | 2 |
| Haerin | 15,716 | 2 | 8,427 | 3 |
| Irene | 14,811 | 3 | 12,257 | 1 |
| Hyein | 12,491 | 5 | 8,241 | 4 |
Irene placed third in the vote, behind two NewJeans members. On our reading count, she leads all three — 1.14x Minji’s total, the vote’s actual first-place name. The gap is real but not large; we’re not overstating it.
We could not match STARPOLL’s fourth-place name in this category to a specific English Wikipedia page with confidence, so we’ve left that row out rather than guess.
The men’s category — a wider gap, running the other way
STARPOLL’s Male Idol vote on the same day: Sunghyun and Kunho, both of CORTIS, took first and second by a wide margin (282,130 and 228,120 votes), ahead of 2PM’s Junho, CORTIS’s Juhoon, and — fifth — BTS’s Jin, with 4,574 votes.
Jin is the only one of the five with his own English Wikipedia page in our panel: 55,153 views over the same 30 days, or 1,838 a day — roughly 12 times his own vote count, and higher than any of the four women’s totals above. We have no individual figure for Sunghyun, Kunho, Junho or Juhoon to set next to his; none of the four has an individual page in our panel yet.
At the group level, the pattern reverses from the women’s category. BTS’s page drew 218,592 views over the same window — CORTIS’s drew 58,269, about a quarter of that. CORTIS’s two members took the vote’s top two spots by a wide margin; BTS’s only vote-ranked member placed fifth with a small fraction of their votes. The reading gap between the groups runs opposite to the vote gap between their members.
What this does and doesn’t tell us
A fan vote and a pageview count measure different behaviors, and neither one is “the real” popularity. In the women’s category, the gap between the two numbers was narrow. In the men’s category it was wide, and pointed the other way at group level. We’re not resolving either into one ranking. We’re reporting what each number actually counts, and where they agree and where they don’t.
Our running method for checking what actually moves English Wikipedia reading is on what-moves-english-reading.
These are statistics, not you. This is not investment advice.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- STARNEWS — STARPOLL — Star Ranking leaderboard (fan-vote app STARPOLL, official AAA 2026 popularity-vote partner), Female Idol and Male Idol categories, accessed 2026-09-16 · https://www.starnewskorea.com/star-ranking
- Wikimedia Foundation — Pageviews API — Daily English Wikipedia pageviews, all-access, user agents only (bots excluded), for named idols and groups, 17 August-15 September 2026 (freshest complete 30-day window archived at the time of writing, ending the day before the vote snapshot) · https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/
What we checked
- Female Idol vote, 16 September 2026: 1. Minji (NewJeans) 18,270 votes. 2. Haerin (NewJeans) 15,716. 3. Irene (Red Velvet) 14,811. 4. an unlisted NewJeans member we could not match to an individual English Wikipedia page (see excluded). 5. Hyein (NewJeans) 12,491.
- Same four names against 30-day English Wikipedia totals (17 Aug-15 Sep 2026): Minji 10,786 (360/day). Haerin 8,427 (281/day). Irene 12,257 (409/day). Hyein 8,241 (275/day).
- Irene's reading total is 1.14x Minji's, even though Minji outvoted her by roughly 1.23x. Haerin, the vote's runner-up, has the second-lowest reading total of the four.
- Male Idol vote, same day: 1. Sunghyun (CORTIS) 282,130. 2. Kunho (CORTIS) 228,120. 3. Junho (2PM) 15,240. 4. Juhoon (CORTIS) 7,363. 5. Jin (BTS) 4,574.
- Only Jin has an individual English Wikipedia page in our panel: 55,153 views over the same 30 days (1,838/day) — roughly 12 times his own vote count, and higher than any of the four NewJeans/Red Velvet totals above. We have no individual reading figure for Sunghyun, Kunho, Junho or Juhoon to set next to his.
- At group level: BTS's page drew 218,592 views over the same window (7,286/day). CORTIS's page drew 58,269 (1,942/day) — about a quarter of BTS's. CORTIS's two members took the vote's top two spots by a wide margin; BTS's only vote-ranked member (Jin) placed fifth with a small fraction of their votes. The group-level reading gap runs the opposite direction from the vote gap.
What we left out, and why
- The Female Idol vote's 4th-place name. Our source page renders it inconsistently across categories and we could not confirm which individual English Wikipedia page it should resolve to. We are not guessing at a match.
- Any individual reading figure for Sunghyun, Kunho, Junho or Juhoon. None of the four has an individual English Wikipedia page in our panel yet — either the page doesn't exist, or it redirects to a group or disambiguation page we exclude on principle. We report the gap in coverage rather than substitute a group number for a person.
- Any claim that STARPOLL's vote is inflated, manipulated, or 'not real.' We don't have evidence either way. What we can say is that it measures something different from what we measure — votes cast by people motivated to vote, not people who happened to look a name up.
- Any explanation for why Irene reads higher than the two women who outvoted her, or why BTS's group page outreads CORTIS's by so much more than the vote gap between their members would suggest. It could be pre-existing name recognition, unrelated news, act age, or something we have no source for.
- Votes from 6th place down. STARPOLL's public leaderboard renders only the top five per category without a login; the rest sits behind an API path we don't call.
The data behind this
Written from the same data
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 /what-moves-english-reading.
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