K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

What gets read across Southeast Asia, and what gets read in one country

Name: What gets read across Southeast Asia, and what gets read in one country
Creator: K Culture Wire

Which kinds of Korean name are read across Southeast Asia rather than in one country?

K-pop groups are the most evenly read, with a median concentration of 41.7% against an even floor of 25%. Esports players are the most concentrated at 100%.

Seven groups, sorted by how evenly they are read

Concentration — the share of a name's four-country total that sits in its single largest country. Four equal countries give 25%. One country alone gives 100%. Names below 10 reads per million are in the panel but left out of the median — Below 10 reads per million the concentration figure swings on a handful of views, so names under that are counted in the panel but left out of the median.

Group	Counted	In panel	Median concentration	Under 40%
K-pop groups	51	255	41.7%	23
Actors	307	1023	42.1%	126
Solo musicians	284	1446	42.8%	108
Luxury, fashion and car brands	18	22	45.3%	7
Footballers	10	807	50.4%	1
Managers who also played	6	49	92.4%	0
Esports players	14	24	100%	0

An even reader would put every group at 25%. Nothing reaches that. The question is which groups come near it.

The bottom row is not what it looks like

The esports row is not a fact about interest. Of the esports players above the threshold, all but one have an article in the Vietnamese Wikipedia and in no other edition here. Their concentration is 100% because there is nowhere else for the reading to sit. Read it as a gap in the encyclopaedias, not a gap in attention.

Read almost equally in all four

Name	Group	Concentration	Total
Kim Jong-kook	Solo musicians	27.5%	43.2
Kim Seol-hyun	Solo musicians	27.6%	10.98
Ji Seong	Actors	27.9%	54.92
Goo Ha-ra	Solo musicians	27.9%	41.19
Lee Hyori	Solo musicians	28.3%	26.28
Lee Sun-kyun	Actors	28.4%	43.55
Cha Tae-hyun	Solo musicians	29.1%	16.06
Kwon Nara	Solo musicians	29.7%	14.11
Stray Kids	K-pop groups	29.9%	127.03
Ateez	K-pop groups	30%	88.68

Read in one country only

Name	Group	Concentration	Where	Total
Peanut	Esports players	100%	Vietnam	96.19
Lee Min-hyung	Esports players	100%	Vietnam	88.57
Jung Ji-hun	Esports players	100%	Vietnam	78.48
Kim Soo-hwan	Esports players	100%	Vietnam	72.5
Ryu Min-seok	Esports players	100%	Vietnam	68.31
Doran	Esports players	100%	Vietnam	59.48
Choi Woo-je	Esports players	100%	Vietnam	44.77
Oner	Esports players	100%	Vietnam	42.99
Park Do-hyeon	Esports players	100%	Vietnam	42.93
Ahn Sung-ki	Actors	100%	Indonesia	36.42

How this was counted, and what it cannot say

Source — Wikidata (CC0) for article links; Wikimedia Pageviews API for reads
Window — 2025-08 through 2026-07, 12 months, human traffic only
Editions — Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia

Concentration says where reading sits, not how much there is. A name read evenly and rarely scores the same as one read evenly and widely. The totals are in the tables so both can be seen at once. And where a name has an article in only one edition, its concentration is fixed at 100% by that fact alone.

Tagalog Wikipedia is too small to measure with — the whole edition draws fewer reads in a year than a single popular article does elsewhere, and Filipino readers largely use the English edition. We do not report a Philippines number rather than report a weak one.

How large each group is · The athletes in full · How we count

What we wrote from this data

K-pop groups are the most evenly read Korean names in Southeast Asia
We measured concentration — the share of a name's four-country reading that sits in its biggest country. K-pop groups come closest to even at 41.7%. The most concentrated row turned out to be an artefact of Wikipedia, not of attention.
14 August 2026