One Korean footballer is read more in Southeast Asia than any Korean actor

Son Heung-min’s Wikipedia article was read more often in Southeast Asia over the past twelve months than that of any Korean actor or singer we measured. Not slightly more — 342.3 against Go Youn-jung’s 273.1, on a scale where each country’s reads are divided by the size of its own Wikipedia.

That is the answer to a question worth asking, because the intuition runs the other way. K-drama and K-pop are the exports people name. Nobody names the Tottenham and LAFC forward first.

The instrument

One thing had to hold for this comparison to mean anything: both groups measured the same way. Same four language editions — Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, Malay. Same twelve months. Same scaling, reads per million reads of the whole edition. The build refuses to run if the two datasets disagree on any of those.

Read the “most read” column and the “median” column against each other. They point in opposite directions. One athlete is above every entertainer; the median entertainer is read twenty times as often as the median athlete.

The athletes’ presence in Southeast Asia is Son Heung-min, Faker, and then a steep drop. Twenty-two entertainers clear 100 against two athletes. Eighty-three clear 50 against nine.

And they are read in different countries

Nearly three quarters of all reading about Korean athletes in these four countries happens in Vietnamese. Two things drive it: Faker and the League of Legends players around him, and Kim Sang-sik and Park Hang-seo, the Korean managers of Vietnam’s national side.

The entertainers spread across Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand within eight points of each other. Korean sport in Southeast Asia is close to a Vietnamese phenomenon. Korean entertainment is a regional one.

Thailand is where the two diverge most. It supplies 28.3% of entertainer reading and 10.1% of athlete reading. Go Youn-jung is read more in Thai than in Vietnamese, and so is Im Yoon-ah — the reverse of what every athlete in the data does.

What this panel is, stated plainly

The entertainer list is the cast of Korean titles that reached a Netflix country chart — the panel the rest of our data is built on. It is therefore an actor panel, not a music one. IU, Jisoo, Cha Eun-woo and Bae Suzy appear here because they have acted; a singer or idol who never appeared in one of those titles is absent entirely, and that includes most of the acts a reader would name first.

That constraint runs one way. It can only make this panel’s numbers too low, never too high, which matters given the direction of the finding — but it also means the ceiling above is the ceiling over Korean actors, not over Korean fame. We are measuring the music side separately and will publish it whether or not it changes the answer.

Reading an encyclopaedia article is not liking someone. It counts people looking someone up, usually after a match, a release, or a headline. 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 on interest rather than a measure of it.

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 Korean entertainers are not read more than Korean athletes.