We could not read this question yesterday. Today we changed the instrument and it reads

Group 1,023 Korean actors by how many of their titles reached a Netflix country chart, then take the median number of times their own Wikipedia article was opened across Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia.

It runs one way and does not turn back. The median actor in the top band is looked up 9.9× as often as the median actor in the bottom one.

Yesterday the same panel gave us nothing

We asked a version of this question a day ago and could not answer it. That piece set out to test whether actors who debut younger end up reaching further, and the bands came out 19, 11, 18, 7 — no direction at all. We published the failure and explained it: half the actors in the panel have exactly one charting title, so the “reach” we could attribute to a person was really the reach of that one title, read back at us.

That explanation was right. What was wrong was the instrument.

“Reach” meant how many countries an actor’s titles charted in — a property of the work. Swap it for how many times the actor’s own article is opened, and the same panel of the same people answers immediately. One is a fact about a show. The other is a fact about a name.

The earlier piece stands. Its distribution — 398 actors with one title, 206 with two — is the reason the top band here is only 192 people, and it is still true that a chart lights most actors once. What changed is what we asked the chart to tell us about them.

Which way the arrow points

This cannot say. An actor with five charting titles is looked up more often, but casting follows attention as readily as attention follows casting, and nothing in this data separates the two. A studio that wants a name in five shows is choosing a name people already open.

Look at the last column before drawing a line. The most-read actor in the one-title band, Karina, scores 115 — well above the median of the top band. This is about where the middle of each band sits, not about what any individual can reach.

What this counts

Reads of an encyclopaedia article, not affection and not viewing. Readers in these four countries also use the English Wikipedia, which cannot be split by country, so every figure here is a floor.

The panel is the cast of Korean titles that reached a Netflix country chart, which is the panel the rest of our data is built on. An actor who works outside Netflix is not here, and a singer who never acted is not here either.

The Philippines is absent. The Tagalog Wikipedia is too small to measure with.

The full table is at An actor with five charting titles is looked up ten times as often.