Squid Game leads by hours, All of Us Are Dead by countries

Ask which Korean show on Netflix was the biggest and you will get one number back: hours viewed. It is the figure Netflix itself publishes, the one every article quotes, and by it Squid Game is first with 5.05 billion hours — seven times the show behind it.

That is a real measurement. It is also a choice, and the choice was made for you.

Change the ruler and the list comes apart

Netflix publishes a second set of files: the weekly top 10 for each country. From those we can count two things Netflix does not rank anybody by — how many countries a title charted in, and how many weeks it stayed on a chart somewhere.

Of the fifteen biggest Korean titles by hours, eleven move at least three places when you order them by countries instead.

When Life Gives You Tangerines is 82 places apart on the two lists. It is enormous by hours and, by the count of countries whose top 10 it entered, unremarkable. Neither of those sentences is wrong.

The two titles the hours ranking never shows you

All of Us Are Dead charted in 93 countries — more than any other Korean title we hold, and one place ahead of Squid Game on that ruler. By hours it is third, and third is where it stays in everybody’s summary.

Further out of sight: I am Solo spent 112 weeks on country top 10s, the longest run of any Korean title in the five years of files. It is nowhere near the hours top fifteen. A dating show held a place on a national chart for more than two years and the ranking everybody quotes has no row for it at all.

Why the two rulers disagree

They are not measuring the same event.

• Hours viewed is a worldwide total. A title can pile up enormous hours inside a handful of large markets and never appear on a small country’s chart.
• Countries charted counts doors opened. A title can enter ninety top 10s without ever topping one of them, and accumulate a fraction of the hours.

So a show can be huge and narrow, or wide and light. English has one word for both — biggest — and that word quietly picks the first meaning every time.

What we are not going to tell you

We are not going to say that countries is the honest ruler and hours is the marketing one. We publish both because the right answer depends on what you are deciding. A distributor buying rights for one territory does not want the same number as a subtitling team planning language coverage, and neither wants the number a fan is arguing about.

What we will say is that “the biggest Korean show on Netflix” is not a fact you can look up. It is a question with at least three defensible answers, and the one you usually get is the one Netflix chose to publish.

The full fifteen, with all three rankings and the charts, is at which ranking is the real one.

So: a show watched enormously in a few countries, or a show that charted in ninety and topped none — which one travelled further? We are not picking. Comments open on that page when they are ready.