K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

An entertainment company is looked up more than Seoul is

Name: An entertainment company is looked up more than Seoul is
Creator: K Culture Wire

Which parts of Korea do Southeast Asian readers look up?

YG Entertainment scores 111.47. The most-read place of any kind is Seoul at 106.54, and 520 of the 520 cities and districts we measured sit below that one company.

YG Entertainment scores 111.47, above 520 of the 520 Korean cities and districts we measured. The most-read place of any kind is Seoul at 106.54. An entertainment company sits in the same band as a major city.

Read this first — what this cannot see

Wikipedia has articles on neighbourhoods, cities, palaces and stations. It does not have articles on individual restaurants and cafes. So this measures which parts of Korea are looked up, not which venues. A venue layer needs the Korea Tourism Organization API, which requires a key we do not yet hold.

A read is curiosity, not a trip. It cannot say who came, only who looked. Arrival counts by nationality are published separately by the Korea Tourism Organization and are the right instrument for visits.

Seven kinds of place

Kind	Places	Total per million	Median place	Indonesia	Vietnam	Thailand	Malaysia
Cities and districts	520	1193.5	0.33	217.3	489.5	240	246.8
Other	559	976.5	0.15	166.3	515.3	195.3	99.6
Companies and agencies	12	235.7	1.55	98.5	73	50.9	13.3
Palaces, temples and heritage	53	167.3	0.23	16	56.4	48.6	46.2
Stations	879	106.5	0.09	3.1	94.1	3.7	5.5
Islands, mountains and parks	114	98.9	0.16	18.8	44.6	27.5	8.1
Stadiums, museums and venues	101	80.5	0.13	13.6	39.6	16.3	11

Stations are the largest group by count and nearly the smallest by reading — 879 of them draw less than 53 heritage sites do. Companies are the reverse: twelve places, and the highest median of any kind.

The fifteen most-read places

Place	Kind	Indonesia	Vietnam	Thailand	Malaysia	Total
YG Entertainment	Companies and agencies	51.64	29.82	22.42	7.59	111.47
President of South Korea	Other	22.23	46.88	28.47	9.24	106.82
Seoul	Cities and districts	19.08	45.91	32.13	9.42	106.54
Korean	Other	17.39	40.59	27.73	6.66	92.37
SM Entertainment	Companies and agencies	36.54	27.13	19.9	3.12	86.69
Busan	Cities and districts	11.57	24.81	21.84	20.26	78.48
Battle of Khe Sanh	Other	0.5	62.52	—	0.4	63.42
Gyeongbokgung	Palaces, temples and heritage	3.52	15.34	18.11	21.11	58.08
Incheon	Cities and districts	11.54	15.27	9.87	20.76	57.44
Itaewon Halloween crowd crush	Other	6.07	37.11	12.05	1.56	56.79
Gwangju	Cities and districts	5.92	14.03	7.23	18.78	45.96
Daejeon	Cities and districts	5.74	14.83	6.23	18.48	45.28
Gwangju Uprising	Other	6.31	24.8	5.32	5.22	41.65
Gyeonggi Province	Cities and districts	4.41	16.27	15.69	2.84	39.21
Ulsan	Cities and districts	5.82	9.8	4.69	18.61	38.92

Each country's own top eight

Read across, not down. The four columns do not hold the same names, and that is the point.

Indonesia

Place	Per million
YG Entertainment	51.64
SM Entertainment	36.54
President of South Korea	22.23
Seoul	19.08
Korean	17.39
Busan	11.57
Incheon	11.54
Jeonju	8.27

Vietnam

Place	Per million
Battle of Khe Sanh	62.52
President of South Korea	46.88
Seoul	45.91
Korean	40.59
Itaewon Halloween crowd crush	37.11
YG Entertainment	29.82
SM Entertainment	27.13
Busan	24.81

Thailand

Place	Per million
Seoul	32.13
President of South Korea	28.47
Korean	27.73
YG Entertainment	22.42
Busan	21.84
SM Entertainment	19.9
Gyeongbokgung	18.11
Gyeonggi Province	15.69

Malaysia

Place	Per million
Gyeongbokgung	21.11
Incheon	20.76
Busan	20.26
Changdeokgung	19.85
Gwangju	18.78
Ulsan	18.61
Daejeon	18.48
Gimcheon	18.28

How this was counted

Source — Wikidata (CC0) for places and article links; Wikimedia Pageviews API for reads
Window — 2025-08 through 2026-07, 12 months, human traffic only
Panel — 2,238 places measured; 49 could not be measured and are left out rather than counted as zero.
Grouping — Wikidata gives dozens of place types. We fold them into seven readable groups by keyword, first match winning. The mapping is ours, so it is stated here rather than hidden: Cities and districts = city/district/dong/county/province/gu/eup/myeon/metropolis/metropolitan/megacity/capital/town/settlement; Stations = station/metro/railway/subway; Palaces, temples and heritage = palace/temple/shrine/fortress/tomb/treasure/heritage/historic; Islands, mountains and parks = island/mountain/park/river/beach/lake/peak/valley; Companies and agencies = company/agency/label/enterprise/business/corporation/chaebol; Stadiums, museums and venues = stadium/museum/arena/theatre/theater/hall/gallery/airport.

The Tagalog Wikipedia is too small to measure with and Filipino readers largely use the English edition, so there is no honest Philippines figure to publish.

The people, on the same scale · What gets read across all four · How we count

What we wrote from this data

In Southeast Asia, a Korean record label is looked up more than Seoul
We measured 2,238 places in Korea against four Southeast Asian Wikipedias. YG Entertainment scores 111.47 and Seoul 106.54. Twelve companies out-read 520 cities and districts on the median. What this cannot see is a single restaurant.
14 August 2026