K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

Which markets only take the wide Korean titles — and which take the narrow ones too

Name: Which markets only take the wide Korean titles — and which take the narrow ones too
Creator: K Culture Wire

Some markets carry Korean titles that went almost nowhere else. Others only ever show the ones that went everywhere. Knowing which is which is how a release order gets built.

Korea's own chart — median breadth 2. Estonia — 78.

The two ends

Only the widest titles get in	Median breadth	Korean share of that chart	Titles measured
Estonia	78	1.8%	36
Slovenia	76	2.2%	50
Switzerland	72	2.6%	59
Lithuania	71	2.1%	44
Malta	71	2.1%	53

Narrow titles get in too	Median breadth	Korean share of that chart	Titles measured
South Korea	2	51.4%	586
Japan	17.5	20.2%	250
Vietnam	21	29.3%	261
Thailand	21	23.4%	275
Taiwan	21	23.6%	258

Breadth is the total number of countries a title reached at any point. For each market we take the median breadth of the Korean titles that appeared there: a high number means only wide titles get in, a low number means narrow ones do too.

63% of the Korean titles that chart in Korea reached five markets or fewer. In Estonia, not one of its 36 did.

The full order of 93 markets is not published, because a league table of countries invites a reading this data cannot support. The two ends are shown with the figure that explains most of the difference beside them. 93 markets are measured — those with at least 10 charting Korean titles.

The right-hand column explains a lot of it

A market that rarely plays Korean titles at all will show only the biggest ones — not because it is hard to reach, but because there is one Korean slot and the biggest title takes it. That is a different statement, and the two are entangled.

Korean share of the chart	Markets	Median breadth	Range within the band
Under 5%	49	62	49
5–8%	12	52	6
8–12%	18	46	9
12% or more	14	21	43

It falls straight down: 62, 52, 46, 21. The more of a chart is Korean, the narrower the titles that get onto it.

But it is not all of it. Inside the under-5% band — 49 markets that all play Korean titles about as rarely as each other — the breadth still ranges across 49 markets' worth. Two countries with the same Korean share can want very different titles.

⚠ A market that carries few Korean titles at all will mechanically show only the biggest ones, so "hard to reach" and "rarely plays Korean titles" are entangled. The Korean share of each market is printed beside its breadth so the two can be read apart, and the markets are also grouped into bands of similar Korean share. What we cannot do is separate them completely.

How this was counted, and what it cannot say

Source — Netflix Top 10 (Tudum) weekly country lists, 2021-07-04 to 2026-07-26, Russia excluded.
Rows read — 493,600, across 988 Korean titles.
Breadth is a lifetime count, not a simultaneous one — a title that spread to 60 countries slowly counts the same as one that opened in 60 at once. That difference is measured separately at when a title is at its widest.

This says which titles appeared, not why. Licensing windows, dubbing, local release dates and how crowded a chart is would all produce this pattern, and none of them is in a rank table. It is also not viewing: a title outside a top 10 is invisible here at any level.

How few titles fill half a market · When a title is at its widest · Where the share went · How we count

What we wrote from this data

On Korea's own chart a Korean title needs no other market. In Estonia the median one had 78
For each of 93 markets we took the median breadth of the Korean titles that reached it. Korea's own chart: 2. Estonia, Slovenia, Switzerland: 78, 76, 72. Most of that gap is how often a market plays Korean titles at all — but not all of it.
10 August 2026