Go Youn-jung, Lee Chae-min and Moon Ga-young: three countries, three different first names

Yesterday we published the Korean music lists for four Southeast Asian Wikipedias. BTS was first in three of the four, and was the only name that appeared on all four.

The actor lists, measured the same way over the same twelve months, do not look like that at all.

Three countries, three first names

Go Youn-jung leads Vietnam (96.35 reads per million reads of that edition) and Thailand (110.83). Lee Chae-min leads Indonesia (79.66). Moon Ga-young leads Malaysia (25.02).

The three who are everywhere lead nothing

Byeon Woo-seok, Kim Seon-ho and Cha Eun-woo each hold a place on all four lists. That is three shared names against the music lists’ one.

None of the three is first anywhere.

Byeon Woo-seok comes second in Indonesia and Thailand and third in Malaysia; Kim Seon-ho sits fourth, fourth, fifth and eighth; Cha Eun-woo is second in Malaysia and fifth to eighth elsewhere. Meanwhile the three names that do lead a list — Go Youn-jung, Lee Chae-min, Moon Ga-young — are each missing from at least one of the other columns.

Travelling everywhere and topping a list turn out to be different achievements, and here they are held by different people.

We wrote that sentence wrong the first time. An earlier draft of the accompanying card said “only Moon Ga-young is both”, which was simply false — she is not on all four lists. It looked plausible, so it survived until someone opened the card and read it. The published version is now computed as a set intersection rather than written by hand, and the intersection is empty.

Who belongs to one country

Read on one list and nowhere else in these tables:

• Vietnam — T.O.P, Kim Ji-won, Jisoo
• Thailand — Kim Woo-bin
• Malaysia — Moon Ga-young, Sohee, Song Ji-hyo, Kim Jae-joong, Kim Sae-ron
• Indonesia — none

Indonesia is the interesting column here: every name in its top ten also appears in someone else’s top ten. Malaysia is the opposite, with five of its ten unique to it, and its numbers run about a quarter of Thailand’s because Malay Wikipedia is a smaller encyclopaedia — per-million puts the columns on one scale, but a smaller readership is still a smaller readership.

This is not a line between singers and actors

The panel is the cast of Korean titles that reached a Netflix country chart. IU, T.O.P and Jisoo are on these actor lists and on the music lists too, because they are on both kinds of credit.

We are not claiming a clean genre split, and the overlap is the reason the two sets of tables can be compared at all: they are drawn from the same encyclopaedias, the same window, and ranked by the same code.

What we did not measure

Why the shapes differ. Music has one dominant name across the region and actors do not, and nothing here explains that. Dramas travel through different windows than songs do, casting is regional, a single series can lift an actor for a year — all plausible, none measured.

Nor is any of this popularity. It counts people opening an encyclopaedia article: fans, people who just heard a name, people settling an argument. And an actor missing from a column may have no article in that language rather than no readers. We do not separate those two.

The four tables and the comparison with the music lists are at which actor each country reads first.