Six Korean titles fill half of America's Korean chart places. In Vietnam it takes 49.

Our world-share page counts what fraction of Netflix’s published top-10 places hold a Korean title. That number hides something: the same 5% can be twenty titles taking turns or one title sitting there all year, and those are different things to be a viewer of.

So we counted the other thing. Across 93 markets and 265 weeks, how many different Korean titles has each one actually seen, and how few of them carry half of it?

The typical Asian market has charted 247 Korean titles. Elsewhere, 85.

All figures are medians of the markets in each group.

In the median Asian market it takes 54 different Korean titles to account for half of all the Korean chart appearances. Everywhere else, 17. And the single biggest Korean title holds 2.8% of the Korean places in the median Asian market against 14.4% elsewhere.

The two ends

Twenty Korean titles have ever entered Ukraine’s top 10 across five years. Two of them account for half of all Korean chart appearances there.

There is a second thing in that table, and it is not the one we expected to write. Squid Game is the largest Korean title in Indonesia and Malaysia too. The difference is not which title leads — it is how much of the market that title is. It leads Indonesia with 2.4% and Latvia with 46.1%, and those two numbers describe completely different viewing experiences of the same show.

Where the leader is a different title, it is a different kind of title. Korea’s own most persistent charting title is I am Solo, a dating show; Vietnam’s is Reply 1988, a series from 2015; and Thailand’s is Alchemy of Souls. None of those is the programme a reader outside Asia would name if asked for a Korean show.

The objection, and what happens to it

A market with fewer Korean places will look more concentrated for arithmetic reasons alone. If a country only ever has 84 Korean chart appearances, it cannot possibly spread them over 247 titles. On that reading this page says nothing except “some markets chart less Korean content”, which we already published.

So we tested it. Take only the markets holding between 600 and 1,200 Korean places — a range where both groups have members — and compare within it.

The Asian markets in that band are Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines and Singapore. The others are Bangladesh, Bolivia, the Maldives, Nigeria, Peru, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

The raw gap in titles-to-fill-half was 37 (54 against 17). Inside the matched band it is 25 (54 against 29). So about a third of the gap was volume, and two-thirds of it is not. That is the honest size of the finding: smaller than the first table suggests, and not zero.

Japan is the shallowest of the ten

Within the ten Asian markets, the number of titles needed to fill half runs from 33 to 117. The low end is Japan: 237 different Korean titles have charted there, as many as its neighbours, but 33 of them carry half the places and its largest single title holds 6.7% — closer to the non-Asian pattern than to Vietnam’s 49 and 2.5%.

We are not going to explain that here. Japan has a large domestic catalogue of its own and a separate history with Korean television, and this data can distinguish none of it. We are naming it because a group of ten with one member behaving differently is worth saying out loud rather than leaving inside a median.

What this is not

It is not a measure of taste. A market whose top 10 rarely holds a Korean title may be watching a great deal of Korean content that never breaks into ten places against everything else Netflix carries; nothing here can see that.

It is not a ranking. The two ends are printed to show the width of the range, and the middle 80-odd markets are not ordered against each other anywhere on this page.

And the surviving two-thirds of the gap is not explained. We controlled for one thing — how many Korean places a market has at all — because it was the objection we could test. Release windows, subtitle and dub availability, and the size of each market’s domestic production are all plausible and none of them is separated here.

Every figure above, including the matched-band control and the full width inside the Asian group, is on the catalogue-depth table with what it cannot answer printed beside it.