Our headline 7.7% is not one place a week — it is nothing, and then several at once

We publish one figure more than any other: Korean titles hold 7.7% of the top-10 places Netflix lists around the world. It is on our front page, in our sales sheets, and in most of our articles.

This one is about what that average hides, and it hides something.

Ten places cannot hold 0.77 of a title

A country’s Netflix chart has ten places on it, published weekly, in two lists — films and series. Call each of those a country-week: one country, one week, one chart. There are 49,290 of them in the 265 weeks we hold.

7.7% of ten places is 0.77 places. No chart has ever held 0.77 of a title. So the real question is how the whole number falls: is one there most weeks, or none for a long stretch and then a crowd?

To answer that you need to know what unclumped would look like. If places fell independently — the same 7.7%, just scattered — at least one Korean title would appear in 54.9% of country-weeks.

The same share, sitting in 14 points fewer weeks. A reader who takes 7.7% to mean “usually about one” is wrong about a seventh of the calendar.

The middle is what goes missing

Read the two columns against each other and the shape is plain. Empty weeks are commoner than chance allows. So are crowded ones: four or more Korean titles in a single country-week happen 4.5% of the time, where independence would give 0.4% — eleven times as often. What disappears is the middle, the quiet single placement that an average implies.

The bottom of that table is worth pausing on. There are country-weeks in which nine of the ten places are Korean. Independence puts that at 0.0%, which is to say it would essentially never happen. It happens.

It is not one or two markets doing it

The obvious objection is that a handful of markets — the ones that take a great deal of Korean content — are producing the whole effect.

They are not. Every market is compared against a binomial built from its own Korean share, so a country that takes very few Korean titles is not counted as clumped merely for being small. Of the 93 markets with at least 50 country-weeks, 80 come out more clumped than chance.

What this changes about our own figure

Nothing about the 7.7% itself. It is the same 37,750 places, counted with the same rule as everywhere else on this site, and it is correct.

What changes is the sentence it belongs in. “Korean titles hold 7.7% of the world’s chart places” is a statement about a total, not about a typical week, and the two are further apart than an average lets on. A buyer planning a campaign around “there’s usually a Korean title up there” would be planning around a week that does not exist in the shape we measured: the common cases are none, and several.

What this cannot tell you

It cannot say why the places arrive together. Netflix publishes neither release dates by country nor what it promoted where, and a chart place is an outcome rather than a decision. A worldwide release day, a festival, a franchise landing three seasons at once, or simply one enormous title occupying attention — all produce the same shape in these lists, and nothing here separates them.

One limit of our own: the independent comparison assumes each place is a separate draw, which is a deliberate simplification. Titles hold positions across weeks, so consecutive weeks are not truly independent of each other. That makes the comparison a floor rather than a precise counterfactual — the real clumping is at least this much.

Why we bothered

Because it is our own most-quoted number, and the difference between “7.7%” and “nothing, then several at once” is the difference between a figure a buyer can plan on and one they cannot. We would rather publish the shape than let the average do work it cannot do.

The full tables — the whole distribution to ten, the per-market count, and the binomial each market was measured against: how the 7.7% actually falls.