K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

Korea lists 1,344 culture datasets. 80% are free, 76% are not maintained

Name: Korea lists 1,344 culture datasets. 80% are free, 76% are not maintained
Creator: K Culture Wire

Korea runs a public platform for culture data — tourism, leisure, the culture industry, K-pop audiences. It holds 1,344 datasets and most of them cost nothing. We counted what is in it, and then counted the part nobody prints: how many are still being updated.

We do not host or republish any of it. Everything here is a count we made from the listing.

What it costs

Free	1,075	80%
Paid	239	17.8%
Price on request	30	2.2%

And the number that goes with it

Months since the listing's own last-updated date, measured 2026-09-06
Updated within twelve months	322	24%
Not updated in twelve months	1,022	76%
Update date unreadable	0	0%

Free and live are not the same thing. 80% of this shelf costs nothing, and 76% of it has not moved in a year. Printing the first figure without the second is how a catalogue gets described as a resource. Every listing carried a readable date, so nothing here is guesswork about age.

How often each one says it updates

Stated cycle	Datasets	Share
Cannot be updated	590	43.9%
Yearly	273	20.3%
No fixed cycle	257	19.1%
Monthly	110	8.2%
Quarterly	82	6.1%
Half-Yearly	21	1.6%
Daily	8	0.6%
Weekly	3	0.2%

590 of them — 43.9% — carry the label 갱신불가 (“cannot be updated at all”). That is often the honest label for a one-off survey rather than a failing, and we read it that way. It does mean a reader should not expect this shelf to answer a question about this month.

What they are about

Topic tags, most common first. One dataset can carry several. Tags are the platform's own Korean labels, translated here.
Tag	Datasets
Tourism	436
Leisure	338
Culture industry	318
Travel	266
Sport	244
Arts	232
Local	207
Culture consumption	191
MZ generation	152
Media	102
Hallyu	88
Libraries	61
Enabling conditions	42
ZIP_MAP	16

What they come as

CSV 1,299 · JSON 263 · ZIP_MAP 16 · PNG 15 · SHP 15 · SHX 15 · DBF 15 · XLSX 6

The oldest ones still listed

Longest since an update. Titles are quoted as examples; we do not republish the data.
Dataset	Last updated	Months ago
지역별 청소년활동 관심지도 (a map of youth-activity interest by region)	2020-06-22	74.5
베트남의 한류(K-POP) 주제 한류 커뮤니티 키워드 데이터 (keywords from Vietnamese K-pop fan communities)	2020-07-01	74.2
케이스타라이브의 국가별 월별 순 방문자 데이터 (monthly unique visitors to K-Star Live, by country)	2020-07-01	74.2
미국의 K-POP 음원 순위 데이터 (K-pop track rankings in the United States)	2020-07-01	74.2
인도네시아의 K-POP 음원 순위 데이터 (K-pop track rankings in Indonesia)	2020-07-01	74.2
베트남의 케이스타라이브 방문자와 국내 방문자수 데이터 (K-Star Live visitors from Vietnam beside visitors from Korea)	2020-07-01	74.2
아티스트를 주제로 하는 트위터 키워드 데이터 (Twitter keywords about artists)	2020-07-01	74.2
케이스타라이브의 국가별 월별 총 방문자 데이터 (monthly total visits to K-Star Live, by country)	2020-07-01	74.2

One of these is worth naming for our own readers: 베트남의 한류(K-POP) 주제 한류 커뮤니티 키워드 데이터 (keywords from Vietnamese K-pop fan communities), last updated 2020-07-01 — 74.2 months ago. Anyone reaching for Korean data on overseas Hallyu audiences will find a shelf that stopped before the last several years of it.

What we could not measure

Whether any dataset is any good. We count what the listing says about it, not what is inside
Whether a paid dataset is worth its price. No price figures are published in the listing we read
Datasets that exist in Korea but are not on this platform. This is one shelf, not the whole library

How this was measured

What this is — A count of every dataset listed on Korea's culture big-data platform: what it costs, what format it comes in, what it is about, and when it was last updated.
How we counted — Every listing on the platform, archived on 2026-09-04, read one row at a time. Price band, stated update cycle, formats and topic tags come from the listing itself; age is the gap between the listing's own last-updated date and 2026-09-06.
Licence — We do not republish any dataset. Everything here is a count we made from the listing, and a few titles are quoted as examples only.

What this cannot tell you

What this is not — Not a judgement on any dataset. We count what the listing says about it, not what is inside it, and an old dataset about an old year is doing its job.

Measured 2026-09-06, from a listing archived 2026-09-04.

What we wrote from this data

Korea's culture data: 80% free, 76% not updated in a year
Korea runs a public platform holding 1,344 culture datasets — tourism, leisure, K-pop audiences. We counted every listing. Most cost nothing. Only 322 have been updated in the last twelve months.
6 September 2026