Korean pop culture, in numbers

The data behind these pages

Nothing on this site is written from a press release. Every figure comes out of tables we build and keep — 6,470 rows across 7 files. This page says what is in them, and it says what is missing from them before it says anything else.

What is in it

Two rulers, not one

The first question anyone should ask about a panel is what put a row in it. Ours has two answers.

The name. Netflix publishes no country of production, so a title enters because its English name matches a Korean work in Wikidata. That can fail in exactly one way — another country made something with the same name — so we measured how often it can. 149 of 397 titles carry a name a foreign work also carries.

Korea's own chart. A Korean title normally also plays in Korea, so we counted every title's weeks on Netflix's South Korea list. 76 of those 149have never appeared on it, and 20 charted in exactly one country in the world. Those columns are in the table, per row, so you can sort by them yourself.

Neither ruler decides alone and we do not hide the disagreement. A Korean work can miss Korea's chart because it was released before this data begins, or was never streamed there. Nothing has been removed on the second ruler's strength alone — it produces a queue to read, and anything we do remove appears on the corrections page with the evidence.

What is missing

We would rather you learned this from us than from a spreadsheet at six in the evening.

The same list is in coverage.csv in a form you can filter, with a column saying whether each gap can ever be filled.

How to get it

Email parkintaek2@gmail.com and say what you are trying to answer. We will tell you whether these tables can answer it — including when they cannot, which is the more useful reply.

Two things we are not doing yet, and why. We have not put a price here, because it is not set. And we are not offering the files as a download yet: the redistribution terms for one of the sources are still being confirmed, and we check a licence before we publish, not after. Ask and we will tell you exactly where that stands.

← Back to the front page