Korean pop culture, in numbers

Which two countries hold the same Korean list

Take one week and two countries. Of all the Korean titles either of them had on a Netflix top 10 that week, what share did both have? We did that for every week and every pair — 4,179 pairs across 269 weeks.

Where both countries take several Korean titles a week

This is the table that answers the question. It uses only the weeks in which both countries had at least five Korean titles — see the next section for why that restriction is the whole measurement.

PairSame titlesWeeks counted
Malaysia & Singapore77.9%100
Indonesia & Malaysia75.9%134
Indonesia & Singapore71.4%107
Hong Kong & Taiwan70.3%96
Malaysia & Philippines67.7%98
Philippines & Singapore66.4%82
Malaysia & Vietnam65.8%136
Indonesia & Vietnam65.1%160
Malaysia & Thailand63.8%103
Singapore & Vietnam63.6%110
Indonesia & Philippines63.3%107
Hong Kong & Singapore61.5%86
Singapore & Taiwan61.4%91
Philippines & Thailand60.6%88
Singapore & Thailand60.4%86

Only 45 of the 4,179 pairs have twenty or more such weeks. For every other pair we say we could not measure it rather than printing a number built on a handful of weeks.

The trap, printed rather than hidden

Rank the same pairs using every week instead, and the table above disappears. These come out on top:

PairSame titlesTitles the smaller side hadWeeks
Denmark & Norway97.1%1.170
Guadeloupe & Martinique96.2%1.4163
Iceland & Norway96.2%1.152
Austria & Germany95.3%1.2100
Norway & Sweden95.2%184
Estonia & Lithuania95.1%172
Switzerland & Luxembourg94%1.296
Denmark & Sweden93.9%1.174

Read the third column. In those weeks the smaller of the two countries had about one Korean title — and when both countries have one title and it is the same title, the overlap is 100%. Agreement is cheap when there is almost nothing to agree about. The high figures are a fact about how little Korean content those markets take, not about how alike they are.

Nowhere looks like Korea

Korea’s own chart is the natural comparison, and it is the one that fails. Even on the restricted measure, the market whose Korean list most resembles Korea’s own shares 38% of it.

Paired with KoreaSame titlesWeeks
Taiwan38%136
Hong Kong37%121
Indonesia36.9%181
Singapore36.5%115
Malaysia35.5%142

At the other end, the lists that look least like Korea’s are Ireland, United Kingdom, Ukraine — between 3.2% and 4.3% on the all-weeks measure. Those are markets where a single Korean title charts and it is rarely the one Korea is watching.

What this data is

For one week and one pair of countries, the share of the combined set of Korean titles that both countries held (an intersection over union). Averaged over every week in which at least one of the two had a Korean title.

Not this. This is not taste. What we measured is what Netflix put on each list that week, and that is licensing, release dates and chart mechanics mixed together with whatever people opened.

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

Weeks in which neither country had a Korean title are left out. Counting them as agreement would make two markets that take no Korean content look like the most alike pair on the board.

Chart rows read
500,340
Weeks read
269
Country pairs measured
4,179
Pairs dropped for too few shared weeks
99
Pairs with 20+ weeks of five titles each
45

Each market’s Korean share on its own is on the country page. The weeks a single chart went all the way — ten places out of ten — are on the all-ten page.

What we wrote from this data