YG Entertainment is looked up more than Seoul is
Which parts of Korea do Southeast Asian readers look up?
Next: The people, on the same scale · What gets read across all four
YG Entertainment scores 111.47. The most-read place of any kind is Seoul at 106.54, and 518 of the 518 cities and districts we measured sit below that one company.
YG Entertainment scores 111.47, above 518 of the 518 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 | 518 | 1193.3 | 0.33 | 217 | 489.5 | 240 | 246.8 |
| Other | 543 | 845 | 0.14 | 150.2 | 418.3 | 182.8 | 93.7 |
| 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 | 878 | 106.3 | 0.09 | 3.1 | 94 | 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 |
| 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 |
| Changdeokgung | Palaces, temples and heritage | 1.71 | 8.87 | 8.08 | 19.85 | 38.51 |
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 |
|---|---|
| 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 |
| Gwangju Uprising | 24.8 |
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 |
Nineteen places we removed, and why
Corrected 2026-08-16. Until this date the most-read Korean place on the Vietnamese Wikipedia was given here as the Battle of Khe Sanh. That battle was fought in Vietnam. It is out of the panel, and the Vietnamese column now opens with President of South Korea at 46.88.
The panel was selected on Wikidata's country property, which records who was involved as well as where a thing is. The Battle of Khe Sanh carries South Korea as a country because South Korea fought there, so it entered a list of Korean places. We re-tested every place against its coordinates instead, because a location does not follow a belligerent.
We re-tested all 2,238 places against their coordinates. 19 fall outside Korea, and together they were 4.61% of every read in the panel. Here they are.
| Removed | Kind | Reads per million | Where it actually is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Battle of Khe Sanh | battle | 63.42 | 16.6539, 106.7242 |
| East China Sea | marginal sea | 13.55 | 30, 125 |
| Yellow Sea | sea | 11.87 | 35, 123 |
| Korean Air Lines Flight 007 crash | airspace intrusion | 11.72 | 46.5667, 141.2833 |
| East Asian Football Federation | international sport governing body | 11.5 | 35.4857, 137.2705 |
| Order of Friars Minor | mendicant order | 7.99 | 41.898, 12.4456 |
| Korean Air Flight 858 | aviation accident | 4.8 | 14.55, 97.3833 |
| Korean Air Lines Flight 902 | aviation accident | 2.68 | 66.0483, 33.0706 |
| 35th parallel north | circle of latitude | 0.95 | 35, 0 |
| 36th parallel north | circle of latitude | 0.93 | 36, 0 |
| Mon National Day | occurrence | 0.68 | 16.4539, 97.5891 |
| Socotra Rock | reef | 0.68 | 32.123, 125.1824 |
| solar eclipse of January 6, 2019 | solar eclipse | 0.33 | 67.4, 153.6 |
| solar eclipse of September 2, 2035 | solar eclipse | 0.2 | 29.017, 158 |
| Hamgyeongbuk-do | human settlement | 0.15 | 41.8, 129.7833 |
| 34th parallel north | circle of latitude | 0.14 | 34, 0 |
| Jang Bogo Station | Antarctic research station | 0.12 | -74.6167, 164.2 |
| Pyeongannam-do | province of South Korea | 0.1 | 39.0319, 125.7538 |
| Manchurian mixed forests | WWF ecoregion | 0.03 | 47.75, 128.75 |
The bounding box is ours, drawn generously around the mainland and the islands (latitude 32.5 to 39, longitude 124 to 132.5). We would rather keep a borderline Korean place than drop one.
Our first attempt at this check used the same country property the panel was built on, and reported that nothing was wrong. A check that reuses the ruler being checked will always agree with it. A place with no coordinate on Wikidata is not counted as outside Korea. Not measured and outside are different things.
Card set — free to share
Five cards, 1080×1350. Every figure on them is in the table on this page. Take them.
14 seconds, with sound
Fourteen seconds, read aloud: we published the Battle of Khe Sanh as the most-read Korean place in Vietnamese, and it was fought in Vietnam. Nineteen of our two thousand two hundred and thirty-eight places are not in Korea at all, which our own first check did not catch. Free to repost with the address on it.
All our short films — each one built from a table on this site
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 — 2,219 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
Card set — free to share
Five cards, 1080×1350. Every figure on them is in the table on this page. Take them.
14 seconds, with sound
Fourteen seconds, read aloud: YG Entertainment scores 111.47 reads per million and Seoul, the most-read place of any kind, 106.54. Five hundred and eighteen cities and districts sit below that one company. These are Wikipedia reader counts per million people, not a measure of importance, and a company and a city are not the same kind of thing — the ordering is what we can count, not a claim about which matters more. 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
- 19 of our 2,238 Korean places are not in Korea
We published 2,238 Korean places. Nineteen are not in Korea, including the one leading the Vietnamese column. The field we selected on records who was involved, not only where a thing is — and our first check reused it and found nothing.
16 August 2026
- Seoul has 25 districts. The tourist count speaks for five
We tried to set what Southeast Asia reads about Seoul beside where foreign visitors walk. In 16 of 24 districts the admissions table counts no tourist site at all — Jung, which holds Myeongdong, among them. It maps where counting stops.
15 August 2026
- A Korean record label is looked up more than Seoul itself
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
How this was measured
We report the median rather than the mean. A handful of very large values would pull a mean away from where most of the sample actually sits, and in reads-per-title data those large values are the norm, not an error. Reads are expressed per million reads of that Wikipedia in that month, so that a large edition and a small one can be compared without the larger one winning by size alone. Places are grouped by kind — cities and districts, companies, heritage sites, stations — and each kind is summarised by its median place rather than its total, so that a kind with many entries cannot outrank one with few by count alone.
What this cannot tell you
A median tells you where the middle sits and nothing about the shape around it, so it should be read next to the range or the full distribution, not alone. Dividing by an edition's own total means a month when that edition was unusually busy lowers every article in it. The ratio measures share of attention inside an edition, not how many people read something. Wikipedia has no article for an individual restaurant or cafe, so a whole layer of places is missing rather than measured as small. Reading about a place is not visiting it. And the four editions do not agree with each other — Indonesia opens with record labels where Malaysia opens with a palace — so the combined figure hides a disagreement that the per-country columns show.