Korean pop culture, in numbers

Does a bigger catalogue travel further per title?

A company that has put twenty titles into a Netflix chart is in more countries than one that has put in two. That much is arithmetic. The question worth asking is whether each individual title goes further — whether scale buys distance, or only sums.

Does a company with more charting titles get more countries out of each one?

Two numbers that behave differently

How this is counted. Reach is the number of markets in which a title appeared in a weekly top 10 at least once, out of 93. Per-title reach is a company's mean across its own charting titles; total reach is the union of the markets its titles reached, so it cannot exceed 93.

Catalogue size against…CorrelationReading
Total markets the catalogue reached0.536Rises with size, as it must — more titles, more countries between them
Markets per title-0.101Flat. Nothing there, and if anything it leans the other way

Size is taken as its logarithm, because the step from two titles to four is a bigger change in a company than the step from twenty to twenty-two. Both figures cover the 96 companies with two or more charting titles. Reach is out of 93 markets, and 207 of the 208 companies we hold have at least one title that charted somewhere — the remaining one has none, so it cannot appear here at all.

The same thing as a table

Charting titlesCompaniesMarkets per title (median)Markets per title (mean)Total markets reached (median)
2 titles2810.817.819.5
3–4 titles361014.426
5–9 titles1511.11450
10–19 titles69.314.964
20 or more111312.173
Markets per title (median)
2 titles10.8
3–4 titles10
5–9 titles11.1
10–19 titles9.3
20 or more13
Total markets reached (median)
2 titles19.5
3–4 titles26
5–9 titles50
10–19 titles64
20 or more73

Both columns are drawn against the same scale as each other's own largest bar. The left one is flat from 2 titles to 20 or more; the right one climbs from 19.5 to 73 markets.

Where the median and the mean disagree

Read the two per-title columns against each other. The median barely moves, but the mean falls from 17.8 to 12.1. That is not a contradiction — it says the small companies in this table include a few whose one or two titles travelled unusually far, and those outliers pull a small group's mean up much harder than a large group's. A big catalogue is not a catalogue of big titles. It is a catalogue with fewer surprises in it.

Companies with exactly one charting title are counted apart

There are 111 of them — more than half of everyone here — and their median title reached 3 markets, far below every band above. 39 of them reached exactly one market, and one of them reached 87.

⚠ We do not read that gap as the value of a second title. A company only appears in this table once something of its own has charted, so a company with two charting titles has already shown something the one-title companies have not. The step from one to two is entangled with which companies get to take it, and this data cannot separate the two. The flat line above starts at two titles for that reason.

The same picture by our own coverage grade

GradeCompaniesCharting titles (median)Total markets (median)Markets per title (median)
A17257110.8
B1565011.1
C175187

Grade A companies hold 25 charting titles at the median against 6 for grade B — four times as many — and reach 71 markets against 50. Per title, they are at 10.8 and 11.1: the same number. The grades describe how much we can see of a company, not how well it travels.

What we wrote from this data

Where these numbers come from, and what they cannot answer

How few companies fill half the shelf · Where on the chart Korean titles sit · How we count