Are Korean entertainers looked up far more than Korean athletes in Southeast Asia?
Yes, at the very top. BTS scores 380.76 against Son Heung-min's 342.3. But only 1 of the 2,511 entertainers measured clears the most-read athlete, so the lead is one act wide, not a category-wide gap.
Most-read athlete 342.3 · most-read entertainer 380.76. Entertainers above the top athlete: 1. On this measure the entertainers lead outright.
Reads per million reads of the whole language edition, summed across the four editions, 12 months. One row is one person. The same four editions, the same twelve months, the same scaling for all three groups — otherwise the comparison would be measuring the encyclopaedias rather than the people.
| Group | People | Most read | Their total | Median | Above 50 | Above 100 | Above 200 | Above 300 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Groups and bands | 255 | BTS | 380.76 | 0.78 | 15 | 7 | 3 | 2 |
| Solo musicians | 1,446 | V | 233.29 | 1.13 | 57 | 16 | 4 | 0 |
| Actors | 1,023 | Go Youn-jung | 273.06 | 2.95 | 83 | 22 | 7 | 0 |
| Athletes | 877 | Son Heung-min | 342.3 | 0.15 | 9 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Managers who also played | 48 | Kim Sang-sik | 137.78 | 0.44 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Luxury, fashion and car brands | 22 | BMW | 66.76 | 28.02 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The ceiling belongs to the athletes and the band beneath belongs to the entertainers. Compare the median column against the "most read" column: they point in opposite directions.
Each group's four-country total, split by country. This is where the two shapes separate most sharply.
| Group | Indonesia | Vietnam | Thailand | Malaysia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Groups and bands | 28% | 34.7% | 28.7% | 8.6% |
| Solo musicians | 34.7% | 28.7% | 28.1% | 8.5% |
| Actors | 36% | 27.9% | 28.3% | 7.8% |
| Athletes | 10.9% | 71.5% | 10.1% | 7.5% |
| Managers who also played | 25% | 62.9% | 5.1% | 7% |
| Luxury, fashion and car brands | 27% | 30% | 20% | 23% |
| Name | Indonesia | Vietnam | Thailand | Malaysia | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BTS | 83.29 (69,836) | 133.45 (79,442) | 130.09 (47,957) | 33.93 (5,528) | 380.76 |
| Babymonster | 94.02 (78,836) | 117.3 (69,830) | 87.36 (32,204) | 15.89 (2,590) | 314.57 |
| Go Youn-jung | 65.88 (55,235) | 96.35 (57,354) | 110.83 (40,856) | — | 273.06 |
| Byeon Woo-seok | 75.98 (63,705) | 59.79 (35,593) | 106.46 (39,246) | 21.63 (3,524) | 263.86 |
| V | 79.18 (66,387) | 85.14 (50,681) | 53.35 (19,668) | 15.62 (2,545) | 233.29 |
| Kim Seon-ho | 53.85 (45,155) | 60.86 (36,231) | 91.8 (33,840) | 14.05 (2,290) | 220.56 |
| Exo | 53.91 (45,204) | 71.29 (42,438) | 77.27 (28,485) | 11.68 (1,903) | 214.15 |
| IU | 46.4 (38,902) | 68.06 (40,517) | 82.08 (30,258) | 12.03 (1,961) | 208.57 |
| Im Yoon-ah | 48.75 (40,877) | 47.2 (28,098) | 96.6 (35,609) | 13.14 (2,141) | 205.69 |
| Cha Eun-woo | 51.85 (43,478) | 55.8 (33,215) | 68.57 (25,276) | 24.11 (3,928) | 200.33 |
| Lee Chae-min | 79.66 (66,789) | 21.72 (12,931) | 98.8 (36,423) | — | 200.18 |
| Rosé | 40.33 (33,818) | 69.49 (41,366) | 51.54 (19,001) | 5.4 (880) | 166.76 |
| Bae Suzy | 34.21 (28,685) | 60.81 (36,197) | 59.14 (21,801) | 11.74 (1,913) | 165.9 |
| Jennie | 36.04 (30,220) | 53.89 (32,081) | 55.42 (20,429) | 14.59 (2,378) | 159.94 |
| Name | Indonesia | Vietnam | Thailand | Malaysia | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Son Heung-min | 80.98 (67,903) | 144.63 (86,094) | 104.99 (38,704) | 11.7 (1,907) | 342.3 |
| Faker | — | 250.45 (149,088) | 9.66 (3,562) | 3.63 (591) | 263.74 |
| Peanut | — | 96.19 (57,263) | — | — | 96.19 |
| Lee Min-hyung | — | 88.57 (52,724) | — | — | 88.57 |
| Jung Ji-hun | — | 78.48 (46,718) | — | — | 78.48 |
| Park Ji-Sung | 20.82 (17,453) | 29.56 (17,598) | 17.9 (6,599) | 6.16 (1,004) | 74.44 |
| Kim Soo-hwan | — | 72.5 (43,161) | — | — | 72.5 |
| Ryu Min-seok | — | 68.31 (40,665) | — | — | 68.31 |
The most-read brand here is BMW at 66.76, against 380.76 for the most-read Korean act.
The most-read brand, BMW, scores 66.76 — about 5.7 times less than the most-read Korean act. A house is not read about the way a person is. What travels is the person wearing it, which is where the ambassador announcements land.
| Brand | Indonesia | Vietnam | Thailand | Malaysia | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BMW | 24.63 | 19.25 | 15.22 | 7.66 | 66.76 |
| Mercedes-Benz | 19.62 | 19.68 | 19.19 | 6.5 | 64.99 |
| Gucci | 6.04 | 11.23 | 20.75 | 20.31 | 58.33 |
| Chanel | 7.47 | 14.01 | 6.24 | 19 | 46.72 |
| Louis Vuitton | 4.82 | 17.95 | 16.26 | 2.72 | 41.75 |
| Balenciaga | 3.65 | 9.83 | 5.65 | 20.36 | 39.49 |
| Calvin Klein | 35.68 | — | — | 3.1 | 38.78 |
| Prada | 7.69 | 8.18 | 2.28 | 18.35 | 36.5 |
| Porsche | 9.54 | 12.16 | 8.73 | 3.16 | 33.59 |
| Fendi | 5.65 | 6.9 | — | 18.24 | 30.79 |
| Dior | 4.73 | 12.7 | 5.95 | 4.64 | 28.02 |
| Hyundai Motor Company | 10.09 | 12.61 | — | 1.72 | 24.42 |
Wikidata records no ambassador or endorsement relation between people and brands. We checked and found none in use. So this cannot say who fronts which house. It measures how much a brand is read about, next to how much a person is read about, on one scale.
This is not every Korean celebrity. It is the cast of Korean titles that reached a Netflix country chart, which is the panel the rest of our data is built on. A singer or idol who never appeared in one of those titles is not here.
Panel — Korean actors credited on a title that reached a Netflix country chart.
Music panel — Korean singers, rappers, idols and songwriters, plus Korean bands and groups. A group is not a person and Wikipedia gives it its own article. Leaving groups out would drop the acts most people name first, so they are counted and flagged.
213 people sit in both the acting and the music panel. 213 people appear in both the acting and the music panel — IU, Cha Eun-woo, Im Yoon-ah and others who do both. They are counted once in the combined figure and once in each group table, which is why the group rows do not sum to the combined total.
Reading an encyclopaedia article is not liking someone. This counts people looking someone up. Readers in these four countries also use the English Wikipedia, which cannot be split by country, so every figure here is a floor on interest, not a measure of it.
Tagalog Wikipedia is too small to measure with — the whole edition draws fewer reads in a year than a single popular article does elsewhere, and Filipino readers largely use the English edition. We do not report a Philippines number rather than report a weak one.
The athletes in full · How we count · What we have corrected
We put 2,511 Korean entertainers, 877 athletes and 22 luxury and car brands on one scale. BTS clears the footballer. Of everyone else measured, nobody does — and the most-read brand sits at a sixth of the leaders.
13 August 2026
We measured 1,948 Koreans with one instrument. Son Heung-min sits above all 1,023 actors. But 22 actors clear 100 against two athletes, and the two groups are read in different countries. Musicians who never acted are not in this panel.
13 August 2026