One film is 58 percent of the English K-pop news feed. In the drama and economy feeds, nothing passes 8 percent

We take a copy of three English-language Google News queries about Korea every day — k-pop, korean drama, korea economy — because a feed cannot be recovered later. Nine days of those copies answer a question we had not thought to ask: what is the English-language news about Korea actually made of?

The answer, for one of the three feeds, is one animated film.

One phrase is most of a feed

We did not pick those phrases. The tool counts every three-word phrase in each feed’s distinct titles and reports the most frequent, which is why the comparison is fair: the same procedure that found a film in one feed found an index name in the second and a drama title in the third.

The drama row is the useful control, because it is the same kind of thing — a single title. Teach You a Lesson was on the Netflix non-English chart during these nine days and its phrase reaches 6.7 percent of the feed. The film reaches eight times that.

Counted on distinct titles rather than item-days, the film is in 152 of 373 — 40.8 percent. Both numbers are in the table below, and we would rather print two than choose one.

The K-pop feed is also the one selling things

We flag a title as carrying a buying word if it contains any of these:

price · prices · buy · where to · how much · cost · costs · launch · launches · launched · drop · drops · restock · sold out · merch · available · availability · preorder · pre-order · on sale · deal · deals · collab · collaboration · collection

That is a count, not a verdict — a headline can mention a price without being an advert.

One item in six in the K-pop feed asks what something costs or where to get it. In the drama feed it is one in thirty-seven. The waffles, the plush toys, the karaoke microphone and the action figures are not a joke about the feed — they are a measurable share of it.

Two-thirds of every feed is yesterday

This is the same measurement we ran on forum and subreddit front pages, where the Google News feeds sat at 44 percent survival to the next day. Read across nine days rather than two, between 63 and 71 percent of what a feed shows you on any given day is something it has shown before. A reader who checks daily is seeing roughly a third new material.

What this means if you publish in English about Korea

Three things follow, and none of them requires an opinion about the film:

1. The K-pop feed is not a K-pop feed right now. If you use it to decide what to cover, you are being handed one title, and mostly its merchandise. Our own axis pages exist because of this — we count who English-speaking readers actually look up, which is a different question from what a feed is full of.
2. The economy and drama feeds are broad, not deep. No single subject passes eight percent, so there is no dominant story to chase and a wide field to be first in.
3. Repeats set the real publishing clock. Two-thirds of a feed is old, which means a piece has longer to be found than the feed’s motion suggests.

We already counted this film’s chart life country by country and the name dispute over it. This piece is not about the film. It is about what happens to a news feed when one subject is that large — and what a publisher reading that feed cannot see because of it.

What we could not measure

We cannot say who wrote any of it. Google News links are redirects and the titles carry no outlet name, so the publisher is unmeasured. That is the figure we most wanted and do not have.

We also cannot say what Google would show anyone else: a feed is one query’s answer, ranked by Google, and personalisation is outside our reach. And one methodological note that changed the headline: quotation marks. Titles print the film’s name with straight quotes and with curly ones, and until we normalised them the same film counted as two different phrases and its share read 47 percent. The 58 is the number after the fix.