Korean pop culture, in numbers

How a Korean title leaves a Netflix chart

Everything published about a chart is about getting on it. This asks the other question: when a title leaves, what position was it in the week before it went?

At position 1 a Korean title is gone the following week 1.2% of the time. At position 10, 70.3%.

What share of weeks at each position turned out to be the last

PositionChance it is gone next weekWeeks spent hereDepartures from hereArrivals here
11.2%10.2%0.4%6.6%
24.8%10.1%1.6%6.2%
39.6%10.3%3.2%7.7%
417%10.3%5.6%9.1%
524%10.5%8.1%10.3%
632.6%9.9%10.4%10.4%
743.7%10%14%11.1%
853.4%9.9%16.9%12.4%
962.2%9.6%19.1%12.4%
1070.3%9.2%20.8%13.7%

A run is one title in one country across consecutive chart weeks. A title that leaves and comes back later has two runs, because the two departures are two separate events. We found 12,026 of them, of which 11,779 ended. A run still on the chart in the last week we hold has not left — our data ended, the run did not. Those runs are counted and set aside rather than treated as departures, because including them would import the final week's whole position table into the answer.

Arrivals look nothing like departures. 13.7% of runs began at position 10 and 6.6% began at position 1 — getting on a chart is spread across the whole list. Leaving it is not. The bottom of a top 10 is not a low position; it is the edge of the list.

Korean titles against every title on these charts

There is an obvious objection to the table above, and it is the right one: if Korean titles simply sit near the bottom of charts, bottom-heavy departures would follow automatically and mean nothing. Korean titles do not sit evenly across a chart, so departures could look bottom-heavy simply because Korean weeks are bottom-heavy. Each group is therefore also shown against the positions its own titles actually occupied, which is the comparison that survives.

Korean titlesAll titles
Departures from positions 8–1056.8%51.2%
Departures from positions 1–35.2%7.3%
Weeks spent in positions 8–1028.7%30%

Every country-week has exactly one title at each position from 1 to 10. If leaving had nothing to do with position, departures would fall at 10.0% on each rank. Nothing has to be simulated: the chart itself is the control.

The last row is the one that decides it. Both groups sit level across the chart, so the difference in the first two rows is in how they leave, not where they were. A Korean title here is slightly more likely to slide out and slightly less likely to be pushed out while still ranking well.

Markets differ, and not by quality

Departures from the bottom three — highestlowest
Argentina68.9%Slovakia41.5%
Indonesia68.7%France44.3%
Norway66.7%Luxembourg44.8%
Nicaragua65.2%Iceland45.5%
Guatemala64.9%Canada45.8%

91 markets have at least 40 measured departures and are included; the rest cannot support a distribution and are left out rather than shown thin.

Neither end of this table is better. A market where departures cluster at the bottom is one where a title slides out. A market where they are spread further up is one where titles are pushed out while still ranking well, which happens where the chart turns over quickly. The two ends of this table are not better and worse markets; they are different rates of replacement.

How this was counted, and what it cannot say

A departure from a top 10 is not a departure from the service. A title that leaves at position 10 may have lost almost no viewing at all, and a title pushed out at position 3 may have lost none. Netflix publishes no viewing figures for country charts, so nothing here measures how many people watched anything.

Does it arrive in one country or many · Is the week it enters its highest · How many weeks it lasts · Titles that came back · How we count

What we wrote from this data