Korean pop culture, in numbers

JAY B of GOT7 is a Thai star, Tempest is a Vietnamese one, and Kim Jong-kook belongs to nobody

Do the four Southeast Asian countries read about the same Korean stars, or does each one have its own?

They do not read the same ones. Of the 214 Korean stars we can compare, 86.6% of all the reading about JAY B of GOT7 happens on the Thai Wikipedia alone. Tempest is at 86.1% in Vietnam, SISTAR at 57.6% in Malaysia. A star read evenly by all four countries would score 25%.

Each country's most concentrated names

The share is of that star's four-country total, not of the country. Reading a row: almost all the people who looked up this person did it on one edition.

Indonesia — 39 stars

StarShare in Indonesia
Gong Myung of 5urprise54.4%
Kim Min-kyu54.2%
Kim Min-gyu of Seventeen49%
Park Sung-hoon48.1%
Na Jaemin47.7%
Choo Young-woo45.2%

Vietnam — 66 stars

StarShare in Vietnam
Tempest86.1%
Jung Il-woo68%
Park Ji-yeon of T-ara67.9%
Shin Sae-kyeong67.6%
T-ara63.6%
T.O.P62.3%

Thailand — 101 stars

StarShare in Thailand
JAY B of GOT786.6%
Jinyoung of GOT760.7%
Kai of EXO57.8%
Hwasa56.2%
Lee Young-ae56.2%
Jaehyun54.9%

Malaysia — 8 stars

StarShare in Malaysia
SISTAR57.6%
Ahn So-hee of Wonder Girls56.5%
Cho Kyuhyun of Super Junior48.2%
Jihyo39%
Kim Jae-joong36.1%
Moon Ga-young33.3%

Malaysia has only 8 stars in this table, and Thailand has 101. That is not a gap in our data — every star here was measured on all four editions. It says that a star whose reading concentrates anywhere tends to concentrate in Thailand or Vietnam rather than in Malaysia.

The stars who belong to nobody

At the other end are the names read almost evenly across all four countries. 25 per cent is the floor — you cannot be more even than that.

StarLargest shareWhereIndonesiaVietnamThailandMalaysia
Kim Jong-kook of Turbo27.5%Thailand10.6410.7511.869.95
Goo Hara of Kara27.9%Vietnam10.0111.499.5610.13
Ji Seong27.9%Thailand15.3114.115.3210.19
Lee Hyori28.3%Thailand7.377.147.434.34
Lee Sun-kyun28.4%Thailand10.47912.3511.73
Stray Kids29.9%Vietnam28.4438.0437.5922.96

Kim Jong-kook of Turbo is 27.5% — within 2.5 points of a perfectly even reader.

What this page cannot tell you

A high share is not a preference. We measured where the reading sits, not where the liking sits. The four editions serve different numbers of readers with different habits, and scaling by edition size only removes the first of those.

Not preference. We measured where the reading sits, not where the liking sits.

Not every star. Only those with an article on all four editions and enough reads to be above our floor.

Not why. A Thai concentration may be touring, a drama, a local partner, or something we have not measured.

A star is only used if all four editions have an article about them. Filling a missing article with a zero would turn "we cannot see it" into "that country is not interested", and those are different statements.

We only use stars whose four-edition total reaches 20 reads per million. Below that a few hundred views in one country can produce a share of 80 per cent, which would say more about the size of the number than about the country.

Wikidata carries some people twice under different spellings — Gong Myung and Gong Myoung, Jinyoung and Park Jin-young. Rows with identical figures across all four editions are treated as the same person and counted once.

How this was counted

Group memberships shown beside the names are read from Wikidata's member-of property, not written from memory.

What we wrote from this data