Stars · music
No BTS member outdraws BTS — 0 of 28 country checks
Seven BTS members, four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, twenty-eight checks. The group page wins every one. Six other acts lose to their own members in every country we could measure — and Mark Lee does both at once.
The table this is written from: /member-vs-group
Take the seven members of BTS. Take the four Southeast Asian Wikipedias where both the member and the group have an article — Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Malay. That is 28 checks.
The group page wins all 28.
| Member | Reads per million, four editions | BTS |
|---|---|---|
| V | 233.3 | 380.8 |
| Jungkook | 139.7 | 380.8 |
| Kim Seok-jin | 74.4 | 380.8 |
| Suga | 72.0 | 380.8 |
| RM | 59.4 | 380.8 |
| J-Hope | 58.8 | 380.8 |
| Jimin | 55.5 | 380.8 |
V comes closest, at 61% of the group’s figure. Jimin is at 15%. Nobody crosses.
That is not how the rest of K-pop reads
Of the 23 member-group pairs we could measure, six lose to their own member in every country where both can be checked:
| Member | Act | Countries the member wins | Member ÷ act |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nana | A.S. Red & Blue | 2 of 2 | 188× |
| Gong Myung | 5urprise | 3 of 3 | 6.8× |
| Mark Lee | SuperM | 3 of 3 | 6.1× |
| Kai | SuperM | 3 of 3 | 3.8× |
| Lee Hye-ri | Girl’s Day | 4 of 4 | 3.9× |
| Jay Park | 2PM | 4 of 4 | 1.4× |
Thirteen pairs lose in every country, seven of them BTS. The rest split.
The same man, two answers
Mark Lee is listed in two acts, and he is the clearest case in the data because the person does not change — only the act beside him does.
| Indonesia | Vietnam | Thailand | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mark Lee | 48.4 | 6.9 | 31.4 |
| SuperM | 8.0 | 3.2 | 3.2 |
| NCT Dream | 36.6 | 12.8 | 38.4 |
Against SuperM he wins all three countries, by six times overall. Against NCT Dream he wins Indonesia and loses Vietnam and Thailand. Same reads, same year, same four encyclopaedias.
So “is the member bigger than the group?” has no general answer. It is a question about a particular act, and the number moves by country.
What this does not say
It does not say BTS is more popular than its members, or that Nana is 188 times anything. It says that when a reader in these four countries went looking, the page they opened was more often the group’s for BTS and more often the member’s for SuperM.
Reading an encyclopaedia article is a floor on interest, not a measure of it. Readers in Southeast Asia also use the English Wikipedia, which cannot be split by country, so every figure here is smaller than the real attention.
The full table — all 23 pairs, all four countries — is at member versus group.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Wikidata — P463 (member of) — K-pop acts and the people listed in them, with their article links in the Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Malay Wikipedias · https://query.wikidata.org/
- Wikimedia — Pageviews API — per-article monthly reads in those four editions, human traffic only, August 2025 to July 2026 · https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/
What we checked
- Reads are per million reads of that edition, not raw counts. The Indonesian Wikipedia is roughly five times the size of the Malay one, so raw numbers would measure the encyclopaedias rather than the acts.
- A member counts as beating the group only in the editions where both have an article. Where one side is missing, that country is left out of the count rather than scored as a win or a loss.
- Twenty-three member-group pairs cleared the floor. Mark Lee appears twice because Wikidata lists him in two acts, and both pairs are kept rather than merged.
What we left out, and why
- Why anyone opened a page. Wikipedia records no reason. A comeback, a scandal, an enlistment and a passing mention in a headline are identical here.
- Popularity, streams, sales and fandom size. This counts encyclopaedia articles being opened.
- The Philippines. The Tagalog Wikipedia is too small for a per-article read to mean anything, and Filipino readers largely use the English edition. There is no honest number to publish, so there is none.
- Members with no article in any of the four editions. That is an absence of an article, not an absence of attention, and it is not counted as a zero.
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 /member-vs-group and /kpop-attention.
What a company sheet contains, and what it cannot tell you →