A scheduler with a neighbouring market on screen wants to know whether it tells them anything. If Thailand takes a Korean series this week, is Vietnam next? This page answers that, and the answer is not the one the question expects.
Does one country's chart lead another's, so that a scheduler could watch a neighbour and know what is coming?
Why this comes before anything else. If Netflix releases worldwide on one day, most titles arrive everywhere at once and there is no lead to find. That number has to come before any talk of leading indicators.
| A Korean series that reached both countries' charts | Times | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Arrived in both the same week | 77,385 | 57.6% |
| One came first | 56,894 | 42.4% |
57.6% of the time nobody leads. Netflix puts a series into every country at once, and more often than not it lands on both charts in the same week. Any leading-indicator story is confined from the start to the other 42.4%.
For each pair of countries we counted how lopsided the ordering is: 0 means the two swap the lead evenly, 50 means one of them is always first. 946 pairs had at least 20 titles arriving in different weeks.
| How lopsided the pair is | Pairs |
|---|---|
| Under 10 points from even | 78 |
| 10–20 points | 92 |
| 20–30 points | 102 |
| 30 points or more | 674 |
The median pair sits 42.3 points from even, out of a possible 50. When one of two countries takes a Korean series first, it is usually the same one of the two — every time.
If one country simply charts a title sooner than another every time, the pairs line up into a single order and there is no neighbour to watch — a scheduler only needs to know whether their own market is an early one. Cycles in the pairs would mean the lead really is pair-specific.
| Countries with enough data to place | 58 |
| Country triples checked | 8,593 |
| Triples that are consistent | 8,591 — 100% |
| Triples that form a loop | 2 |
2 loops out of 8,593. If A takes a title before B and B before C, then A takes it before C — essentially always. That is what it looks like when 58 markets are standing in one queue, not passing signals to each other.
So the answer to the question is no. Watching a neighbour tells you nothing that knowing your own position does not already tell you, and your own position does not change from title to title. A scheduler needs one fact — am I early or late — and after that the neighbour's chart is redundant.
⚠ We are not publishing the order itself. Ranking 58 markets by how fast they take Korean titles would be a league table, and a league table is the one thing this publication does not make. The finding is that an order exists and is stable; which end a given market sits at is a question for that market's own sheet.
| Chart rows read | 493,600 |
| Korean series rows | 28,354 |
| Weeks | 265 |
| Korean series that charted in two or more markets | 235 |
| Country pairs seen at all | 4,278 |
| Country pairs with enough titles to measure | 946 |
4,278 pairs were seen and only 946could be measured. A pair needs at least 20 titles that arrived in different weeks, and most pairs of countries have never shared that many Korean series with a gap between them. The 20 is our threshold, not Netflix's.
Of 134,279 times a Korean series reached two countries charts, 57.6% arrived in both the same week. Where one did come first, only 2 of 8,593 country triples contradict each other — the markets form one stable order.
9 August 2026
How titles arrive and spread · Does an earlier hit help the next one · How we count