Korean pop culture, in numbers

Which markets pick up a Korean title first

A Korean title first appears on some country’s top 10. That week is its debut. We then asked, for every other market, how many weeks later it first carried the same title — across 949 titles and 92 markets.

The median is almost useless here. This is why

Nearly every market’s median lag is zero or one week, because a Korean title usually enters many charts in the same week. A median cannot separate markets that all sit at zero. What separates them is how often they are in that first week at all, so that is the column to read.

Fastest, excluding Korea

MarketIn the debut weekWithin four weeksMedian lagTitles
Malaysia71.9%89.2%0249
Indonesia71.6%88.3%0264
Thailand70.8%84.6%0267
Vietnam68.8%88%0250
Singapore67.3%87.8%0245
Taiwan65.9%88%0249
Philippines64.5%87.5%0248
Hong Kong60.9%83.4%0235
Slovakia60.3%82.8%058
Czech Republic57.8%84.4%064
Qatar57.7%86.3%0175

Korea itself is at 87% on 575 titles, and it is left out of the table above on purpose: for most of these titles Korea is the debut week, so including it would be scoring a market against a line it drew itself.

Slowest

MarketIn the debut weekMedian lagTitles
United Kingdom32.6%3.546
Egypt25.2%1107
Iceland26.2%142
Lithuania29.3%141
Slovenia30.4%146
Malta32.1%153
Serbia32.1%156
South Africa33.3%166
Lebanon33.3%190
Italy33.3%166
Netherlands34.1%141
Spain34.7%175

A market low on this table is not slow at watching. It is a market where fewer Korean titles chart at all, so the ones that do tend to be the few that build up over weeks rather than arrive at once. United Kingdom has only 46 Korean titles in the whole five years.

What this data is

A title's debut is the earliest week it appears on any country's top 10 in these files. A market's lag on that title is the weeks between the debut and that market's own first week with it. We report each market's median lag.

Not this. This is not when people in a country started watching. Netflix decides when a title becomes available in each market, and that release calendar is inside this number in a way these files cannot separate from anything else.

Netflix Top 10 (Tudum) per-country weekly lists. Russia excluded — Netflix stopped publishing its list in February 2022.

Titles whose debut is the first week we hold (2021-07-04) are dropped, because they may have been charting before Netflix began publishing and their lag would come out too small.

Chart rows read
500,340
Korean titles seen
974
Titles counted
949
Titles dropped — debut is our first week
25
Markets measured
92
Markets dropped — under 30 titles
1

Each market’s Korean share is on the country page; whether Korea charts a title before anyone else is on the home-first page.

What we wrote from this data