Exactly one Korean act is read more than Son Heung-min in Southeast Asia

BTS scores 380.76. Son Heung-min scores 342.3. Those are reads of their Wikipedia articles across Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia over twelve months, each country’s count divided by the size of its own Wikipedia so the four can be added.

BTS is the only Korean act above him. Of 2,511 entertainers measured — 255 groups, 1,446 solo musicians, 1,023 actors, minus the 213 who are in both the music and acting panels — exactly one clears the footballer.

Six groups, one instrument

Three figures clear 300: BTS, Son Heung-min, and Babymonster at 314.6. Below that the shape changes by group rather than the ranking. The athletes are top-heavy — one name, then a cliff, and a median of 0.15. The actors are the opposite: nobody at the very top, but 83 of them clear 50 and their median is twenty times the athletes’.

The brands are not read at all

The most-read brand in the set is BMW, at a fifth of BTS. Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton — the houses that appoint Korean ambassadors and get the coverage for it — sit between 28 and 47. Hermès is at 13.9. Genesis, Hyundai’s luxury marque, is at 1.0 and has an article in only one of the four editions.

There is a caveat that matters here and we could not remove it: Wikidata records no ambassador or endorsement relation between people and brands. We looked and found none in use. So this cannot say who fronts which house, only how much each is read about. What the numbers do say is that the reading follows the person, not the label. An ambassador announcement travels because a Korean act is attached to it.

Malaysia is the exception worth noting. It supplies 7 to 8.6% of the reading for every group of people in this data, and 23% of the reading for brands — the only place where brand interest runs ahead of person interest.

Sport is Vietnamese, entertainment is regional

Every entertainment row spreads across Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand within eight points. The athlete row does not: 71.5% of all reading about Korean athletes in these four countries happens in Vietnamese, driven by Faker and the League of Legends players, and by the Korean managers of Vietnam’s national football side.

Korean sport in Southeast Asia is close to a Vietnamese phenomenon. Korean entertainment is a regional one.

What this cannot say

Reading an encyclopaedia article is not liking someone, buying something, or going anywhere. It counts people looking something up. Readers in all four countries also use the English Wikipedia, 82 billion reads in this window and not splittable by country, so every figure here is a floor rather than a measure.

The acting panel is the cast of Korean titles that reached a Netflix country chart, so it under-counts actors who work outside Netflix. The music panel is Korean singers, rappers, idols and songwriters on Wikidata plus Korean bands and groups; an act with no Wikidata occupation recorded is absent. The brand list is 22 names we chose and resolved to Wikidata items by their English article titles — it is a sample, not a census.

The Philippines is absent. The Tagalog Wikipedia is too small to measure with and Filipino readers largely use the English edition, so there is no honest number to publish.

The full tables are at One Korean act outreads Son Heung-min in Southeast Asia.