Korean pop culture, in numbers

Our headline 7.7% is not one place a week — it is nothing, then several at once

We publish one figure more than any other: Korean titles hold 7.9% of the top-10 places Netflix lists around the world. This page is about what that average hides.

Our headline figure is an average. Is a Korean title on a country chart most weeks, or absent most weeks and several at once when it is there?

Ten places cannot hold 0.77 of a title

How this is counted. A cell is one country-week-chart. "Any" means at least one Korean title held a place in that cell. The even comparison is what the same overall share would produce if places fell independently.

Ten places cannot hold 0.77 of a title. To say a share is clumped you need to know what unclumped would look like, so each country is compared against a binomial with that country's own share.

Country-weeks with at least one Korean titleShare
If the same 7.9% fell independently55.9%
Actually observed41.3% — 20,581 country-weeks
Shortfall against independence26.1% fewer weeks

The same share, sitting in far fewer weeks. A reader who takes 7.9% to mean "usually about one" would be wrong about 14.6 points of the calendar.

How many Korean titles a chart holds in one week

Korean titles in that country-weekCountry-weeksObservedIf independent
029,26758.7%44.1%
111,56123.2%37.6%
24,6709.4%14.4%
32,0764.2%3.3%
48951.8%0.5%
55261.1%0%
64030.8%0%
72770.6%0%
81220.2%0%
9430.1%0%
1080%0%

Read the two right-hand columns against each other. Empty weeks are commoner than chance allows — 58.7% against 44.1% — and so are crowded ones: four or more Korean titles in a single country-week happen 4.6% of the time, where independence would give 0.5%. The middle is what goes missing.

It is not one or two markets doing it

Countries differ in how much Korean content they take. Pooling them would let a difference between countries be read as clumping inside one.

Markets measured (at least 50 country-weeks)93
Markets where places are more clumped than independence82
Chart rows read499,180
Country-weeks read49,848
Korean places39,139
All places498,480

Every market is compared against a binomial built from its own Korean share, so a country that takes very few Korean titles is not counted as clumped merely for being small. 82 of 93 still come out more clumped than chance.

How clumped a market isMarkets
Less clumped than independence10
Up to 10% fewer weeks than independence57
10–25% fewer25
25–40% fewer1
40% or more fewer0

No market is named here on purpose. Ranking 93 countries by how lopsided their Korean weeks are would be a league table, and a league table invites the reader to treat position as merit — when what is being measured is release timing, chart volatility and catalogue size mixed together. Which end a given market sits at belongs in that market's own sheet.

There is one place where a country has to be named, because the thing being counted is an event and not a position: the weeks a chart went all the way, ten places out of ten. Those are listed by country and week — eight of them, four outside Korea. Naming them is not a ranking; it is saying when it happened.

What we wrote from this data

Where these numbers come from, and what they cannot answer

What share of chart places Korean titles hold · What a position does not say · The four weeks a country’s whole TV top 10 was Korean · How we count

14 seconds, with sound

Fourteen seconds, read aloud: four times outside Korea — Vietnam twice, then Indonesia and Malaysia in the same week — every one of a country's ten Netflix TV places was Korean. That is 0.02% of the country-weeks we checked. In 11,594 of them, a country's top 10 held exactly one Korean title. A top 10 is a ranking of what was watched most, not a census, and Netflix releases no viewer numbers by country at all. Free to repost with the address on it.

All our short films — each one built from a table on this site