Only four countries have come close to an all-Korean top 10

We have already counted the weeks a Netflix country chart was Korean in all ten places: four of them outside Korea, Vietnam twice and then Indonesia and Malaysia in the same week of July 2022.

Four events cannot tell you which countries this happens in. With numbers that small, one more week either way changes the list. So we widened the measure by exactly one place and counted the charts that came within one: nine of the ten held by Korean titles.

There are 43 of those, in 50,034 country-week charts. Together with the eight full houses, that is 51 charts — and outside Korea they land in four countries.

The four

No European, North American, Latin American or African chart has ever come within one place of it. Not once, in any of the 50,034 charts we read. Korea’s own chart did it 29 times, which is the ordinary half of the count — a country’s chart being full of its own shows is what most countries’ charts look like most weeks.

The country that is missing from that table

Taiwan takes the fourth-largest Korean share of any market outside Korea — 24.2% of all chart places, a hair behind Malaysia’s 25.1% and ahead of almost everywhere else. Taiwan has never had nine of ten. Neither has the Philippines, at 22.8%.

If a chart filling up were simply a large share showing up, the table above would follow the share order. It does not. What separates them is a different axis, and it is one we already publish: whether Korean titles arrive in a market together or one at a time.

Ranked by how much more lopsided a market’s Korean weeks are than chance allows, the top four are Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. Three of those four are in the table above. Vietnam is the fourth market in the table and is not in that top four: it is sixth on that measure. What Vietnam has is the largest foreign share and bursts — second on one axis, sixth on the other — and that combination is what produces ten in a row.

A market can take a great deal of Korean content steadily, or take it in bursts. Only the bursts produce a week like these, and share alone cannot tell you which kind of market you are looking at.

What we are not saying

We are not saying more people in Malaysia watched Korean shows than in Taiwan. Netflix publishes the position, not the audience. Ten Korean titles in a small market’s top ten and ten in a large one are the same ten places in this data.

We are not saying Southeast Asia likes Korean shows more. What we measured is chart concentration, and concentration is produced by release timing, catalogue size and how much else is competing that week — not by preference. Two of those three are decisions Netflix makes.

And we are not ranking countries. Our clumping page deliberately names no market, because ranking 93 countries by how lopsided their weeks are invites the reader to read position as merit. The countries are named here because what is counted is an event with a date, not a position.

Every cell, every near miss and the row counts behind them are on the all-ten page.