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So Ji-sub outreads ROSÉ 2.1 to 1 in English — 26 Wikipedias against 86

Name: So Ji-sub outreads ROSÉ 2.1 to 1 in English — 26 Wikipedias against 86
Creator: K Culture Wire

1,019 Korean actors, singers and songwriters, each one measured by how many people opened their English Wikipedia article between 2026-07-21 → 2026-08-20. The top hundred are here.

Read this first — these are readers, not searches

This counts people who opened an article. It is not a search-volume figure, and we do not have one: paid keyword data is not something we buy. It is also not a ranking of talent, income or chart position. It is the size of attention, measured the same way for everyone.

Titles are resolved from Wikidata rather than guessed. Guessing cost us once: asking for “IU” returned 1,264 readers, while her actual article returned 59,582. A ranking built on guessed titles is a false ranking.

The top twenty, drawn

Readers who opened the English Wikipedia article, 2026-07-21 → 2026-08-20. Sorted by this bar.

Now the same twenty people, measured with a different ruler

How many language editions of Wikipedia carry an article about them. ⚠ Still in the order above — sorted by readers, not by this bar. The raggedness is the point: the two rulers disagree.

Read the two together. So Ji-sub is opened 170,257 times in thirty days while carrying an article in 26 languages. ROSÉ carries 86 — the widest in this top thirty — and is opened 80,923 times, which is 2.1 times fewer. Breadth across languages and readership in English are not the same quantity, and nothing here says which one is fame.

The hundred

Between them, 5,440,444 readers in thirty days. We re-measure every month, so this order moves — that is the point of keeping it.

#	Name	Readers, 30 days	Born	Who shares this birthday
1	So Ji-sub	170,257	1977-11-04	same day
2	Jung Hae-in	164,142	1988-04-01	same day
3	V	126,321	1995-12-30	same day
4	Park Eun-bin	124,423	1992-09-04	same day
5	Jennie	121,980	1996-01-16	same day
6	Ken Jeong	119,370	1969-07-13	same day
7	Jungkook	113,190	1997-09-01	same day
8	Steven Yeun	113,106	1983-12-21	same day
9	Arden Cho	98,410	1985-08-16	same day
10	Eric Nam	91,525	1988-11-17	same day
11	Jisoo	89,061	1995-01-03	same day
12	Nam Joo-hyuk	84,955	1994-02-22	same day
13	Roh Yoon-seo	83,555	2000-01-25	same day
14	ROSÉ	80,923	1997-02-11	same day
15	Yang Se-jong	77,155	1992-12-23	same day
16	Daniel Dae Kim	76,300	1968-08-04	same day
17	Park Ji-hyun	76,296	1994-11-26	same day
18	Jimin	74,943	1995-10-13	same day
19	Cha Eun-woo	72,585	1997-03-30	same day
20	Kim Seok-jin	71,245	1992-12-04	same day
21	Jun	70,395	1997-01-22	same day
22	Pom Klementieff	69,814	1986-05-03	same day
23	RM	69,733	1994-09-12	same day
24	Kim Go-eun	69,156	1991-07-02	same day
25	Suga	67,519	1993-03-09	same day
26	Kim Hye-jun	65,842	1995-05-08	same day
27	Kim Mu-yeol	61,758	1982-05-22	same day
28	Lee Byung-hun	60,849	1970-07-12	same day
29	Shin Min-a	60,804	1984-04-05	same day
30	J.Y. Park	59,829	1971-12-13	same day
31	IU	59,582	1993-05-16	same day
32	J-Hope	58,410	1994-02-18	same day
33	Son Na-eun	56,278	1994-02-10	same day
34	Byeon Woo-seok	55,426	1991-10-31	same day
35	Kim Soo-hyun	55,208	1988-02-16	same day
36	Ji Seong	55,076	1977-02-27	same day
37	Ji Chang-wook	55,013	1987-07-05	same day
38	Son Ye-jin	54,366	1982-01-11	same day
39	Ma Dong-seok	54,146	1971-03-01	same day
40	Lee Dong-wook	53,732	1981-11-06	same day
41	Joo Sang-wook	53,726	1978-07-18	same day
42	Peggy Gou	53,339	1991-07-03	same day
43	Go Youn-jung	53,132	1996-04-22	same day
44	Jun Ji-hyun	50,637	1981-10-30	same day
45	Kim Woo-bin	49,111	1989-07-16	same day
46	Seo In-guk	48,502	1987-10-23	same day
47	Kim Sae-ron	46,950	2000-07-31	same day
48	Hwang In-yeop	46,696	1991-01-19	same day
49	Lee Min-ho	46,439	1987-06-22	same day
50	Ejae	46,082	1991-12-06	same day
51	Ong Seongwu	45,599	1995-08-25	same day
52	Lee Hye-ri	44,466	1994-06-09	same day
53	Kim Seon-ho	43,769	1986-05-08	same day
54	Song Joong-ki	42,047	1985-09-19	same day
55	Lim Ji-yeon	41,990	1990-06-23	same day
56	Felix	41,156	2000-09-15	same day
57	Gong Yoo	40,393	1979-07-10	same day
58	Hyun Bin	40,299	1982-09-25	same day
59	Park Bo-gum	39,183	1990-06-16	same day
60	Gong Hyo-jin	38,273	1980-04-04	same day
61	Bang Chan	36,993	1997-10-03	same day
62	Namkoong Min	36,935	1978-03-12	same day
63	Jung So-min	36,868	1989-03-16	same day
64	Paul Sun-Hyung Lee	35,712	1972-08-16	same day
65	Park Seo-joon	35,697	1988-12-16	same day
66	Bae Suzy	35,568	1994-10-10	same day
67	Park Ji-hoon	35,098	1999-05-29	same day
68	Jin Ki-joo	35,067	1989-01-26	same day
69	Shin Hae-sun	34,976	1989-08-31	same day
70	Kim You-jung	34,631	1999-09-22	same day
71	Lee Jong-suk	34,503	1989-09-14	same day
72	Jang Won-young	34,418	2004-08-31	same day
73	Karina	34,336	2000-04-11	same day
74	Song Kang-ho	33,313	1967-01-17	same day
75	Ha Yoon-kyung	33,119	1992-10-20	same day
76	Hwasa	32,662	1995-07-23	same day
77	Cho Seung-woo	32,590	1980-03-28	same day
78	Rain	32,528	1982-06-25	same day
79	Park Shin-hye	32,420	1990-02-18	same day
80	Kim Hye-soo	32,411	1970-09-05	same day
81	Danielle Marsh	32,300	2005-04-11	same day
82	Lee Sun-bin	32,230	1994-01-07	same day
83	Lee Jung-jae	31,885	1972-12-15	same day
84	Cho Yeo-jeong	31,510	1981-02-10	same day
85	Han So-hee	31,193	1993-11-18	same day
86	Lee Sun-kyun	31,018	1975-03-02	same day
87	Lee Do-hyun	30,251	1995-04-11	same day
88	Ok Taec-yeon	30,109	1988-12-27	same day
89	Psy	30,100	1977-12-31	same day
90	Moon Ga-young	30,098	1996-07-10	same day
91	G-Dragon	29,911	1988-08-18	same day
92	Im Yoon-ah	28,898	1990-05-30	same day
93	Lee Jun-ho	28,748	1990-01-25	same day
94	Jay Park	28,731	1987-04-25	same day
95	Ahn Bo-hyun	28,513	1988-05-16	same day
96	Yeonjun	28,511	1999-09-13	same day
97	Park Min-young	28,271	1986-03-04	same day
98	Kwak Dong-yeon	28,245	1997-03-19	same day
99	T.O.P	27,894	1987-11-04	same day
100	Heo Sung-tae	27,716	1977-10-20	same day

What this cannot tell you

An English Wikipedia article is not the whole world. Someone read mostly in Indonesian or Vietnamese is under-counted here — we publish that other axis separately, and the two disagree more often than you would think.

Where Wikidata carries no English label for a person, we show the title of their English Wikipedia article instead (Karina, Winter, Kai). That is the name Wikipedia uses, not one we invented, and nobody is dropped from the ranking for it.

A name with no English article cannot appear at all. 919 more people were measured and are not shown on this page; nobody was recorded as zero for want of a measurement.

How many we could not measure: 0 of 1,019. Every person in the roster returned a reader count, so nothing here is standing in for a missing number.

How this was counted

Source — How many people opened each person's English Wikipedia article in the last 30 days (human traffic only). Titles are resolved from Wikidata, never guessed.
Not this — Search volume. We hold no paid keyword data. This is the size of interest in a name, not the number of searches for it.
Window — 2026-07-21 → 2026-08-20 (human traffic only, bots excluded by the API)
Roster — Korean citizens with an entertainment occupation on Wikidata and at least 14 Wikipedia editions

The twelve birth-year rooms · The birth-day count · Whether a birth year predicts any of this (it does not)

Does this ranking mean anything?

Here is the case against it. This counts English Wikipedia. A name read mostly in Indonesian, Vietnamese or Spanish is undercounted, and a name carried in 86 language editions can still sit below one carried in 26. A single drama airing this month moves a name hundreds of places. By this ruler, the biggest Korean star is whoever the English-reading room happened to look up in the last thirty days.

Here is the case for it. It is the same measurement applied to every name, it is not bought, not modelled and not voted on, and it is re-taken every month so you can watch it move. Nobody is scored on talent and nobody is left out for being unpopular.

So: is a ranking like this worth publishing, or does it just tell people who to look at next? We are not going to settle that for you — but we would rather argue about it in the open than quietly print a number.

What do you think?

No cookie, no IP, no third-party tracker — we built this ourselves.

14 seconds, with sound

Fourteen seconds, read aloud: Crash Landing on You had one hundred thirty one thousand reads on its biggest day and Hyun Bin took thirty four point two percent of that. Parasite had two point seven million and Song Kang-ho took three point nine. Across twelve Korean breakouts the bigger the title, the smaller the share reaching any one actor — but these twelve are titles we picked because we knew they broke out, so this is a pattern inside a list of winners, not a law. Free to repost with the address on it.

All our short films — each one built from a table on this site

What we wrote from this data

Korean outlets named two BTS members in three days. Readers opened the other five
Across 90 K-culture headlines from two Korean outlets, 19 mentioned BTS. Only Jin and Jimin were named — 12 and 9 times. V and Jung Kook, the two most-read members on English Wikipedia, were named zero times.
4 September 2026
Hyun Bin took 34% of his show's peak. Song Kang-ho got 3.9%
We measured twelve Korean breakouts on English Wikipedia: the title's biggest day, and that day for its most-read cast member. The bigger the title, the smaller the share reaching any one actor. r = -0.68, n = 12, p = 0.016.
1 September 2026
Choi Baek-ho: 3,454 reads in Korean, no English page
On 30 August, 75 Korean entertainers were in the Korean Wikipedia's 300 most-read articles. 26 of them have no English Wikipedia article at all. Nineteen of those 26 are singers.
1 September 2026
Ryu Jun-yeol's Mousetrap outdrew Squid Game 4.5 to 1
On 29 August the English Wikipedia article for the Korean series Mousetrap was opened 23,512 times — rank 157 in the world that day. Squid Game's best day in the same month was 5,205. Two days earlier Mousetrap drew 658.
1 September 2026
Jennie and V are top-5 read and outside our Netflix panel
We rank 300 Korean names by Wikipedia reads. Nine of the top twelve — V, Jennie, Jungkook, Jisoo, ROSÉ — have fewer than two Netflix charting titles, so our own panel cannot see them. That is 38.8% of the reading.
1 September 2026
Nolan's Odyssey outreads 14 Korean 2026 films combined
In August, Korean Wikipedia opened the article on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey 119,356 times. Every Korean film released in 2026 that has a Korean Wikipedia article, added together, drew 19,822. That is six to one, at home.
1 September 2026