Korean pop culture, in numbers

Half of the Korean actors on a Netflix chart are there for one title

How many charting titles does one Korean actor have, and does starting young buy more?

49.5% of 1,329 actors have exactly one charting title. 68.7% have two or fewer.

How many charting titles one actor has

Charting titlesActorsShareCumulative
165849.5%49.5%
225519.2%68.7%
316012%80.7%
4906.8%87.5%
5564.2%91.7%
6 or more1108.3%100%

Actors. One row is one person, counted once.

Half of these actors have exactly one charting title, so the reach we could attribute to them is the reach of that one title. It is a fact about the title, not about the person, and no amount of arithmetic separates the two here.

What we tried to measure, and did not find

We set out to test whether Korean actors who debut younger end up reaching more countries. Grouped by age at first credit, the median widest reach runs as below. It does not move in one direction, and it flips again when years active are held fixed.

Age at first creditActorsMedian titlesMedian widest reachMedian years active
under 1813621922
18–2023521122
21–2426521821
25 or older1132722

The bands do not move in one direction, so we do not report debut age as buying anything. This page carries the negative result rather than dropping it — a measurement taken and not published is a measurement not taken. Bands under 15 actors would not get a median at all.

How this was counted, and what it cannot say

It counts titles that reached a Netflix country chart. Theatre, cinema releases that never charted, and broadcast work are absent, so a one-title actor here is not a one-title actor.

How much of a title's reach is the slot it opened in · Which work is this chart row · How we count

What we wrote from this data