- New Korean groups look 69% down since 2015. We are not publishing that, and here is what killed it
Sat Aug 22 — Wikidata records 691 Korean musical groups with a formation year. The 2023-25 average is 31% of the 2015-17 average. Then we ran the same count for Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom — and all three fell too.
- Southeast Asia looks up a Korean trip in December. It stops looking in June
Sat Aug 15 — Reads of Korean travel articles in four Southeast Asian Wikipedias peak in December; flights on the Asia routes peak in January. The steadier signal is the other end — both fall to their lowest point in the same month.
- Southeast Asia's Korean travel pages fell by a third. Its Korean culture pages did not
Sat Aug 15 — Reads of Korean travel articles in four Southeast Asian Wikipedias fell 30% in a year. Korean culture articles fell 14%, Japanese and Taiwanese culture articles rose, and air passengers on the Asia routes barely moved.
- Seoul has 25 districts. Korea's public tourist count can speak for five of them
Sat Aug 15 — 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.
- Indonesia reads more about German cars than any of its neighbours, and less about luxury houses than all of them
Fri Aug 14 — Split 22 brands by kind and the four Southeast Asian countries swap places. Indonesia is first among car makers on 53.79 reads per million and last among luxury houses on 38.45. A single ranking hides that.
- A quarter fewer Korean titles reach a Netflix top 10 than in 2022. The space they hold did not shrink
Mon Aug 10 — 289 Korean titles charted somewhere in 2022 and 216 in 2025, while the places they held rose 7.9%. Remove each year's biggest title and the ten largest gained just 3.6 points — most of the concentration is one show returning.
- Two shows from one Korean company on the same chart cost each other half a place
Sun Aug 09 — Across 801 matched pairs, a Korean series sits at rank 5.73 on the weeks a stablemate shares the chart and 5.2 on the weeks it is alone. The direction is the one schedulers fear. The size is half of one place out of ten.
- Korean drama costs rose 27-fold. The chart concentration the argument predicts did not appear
Sun Aug 09 — The case that Netflix gained leverage over Korean drama runs through cost: $360,000 an episode in 2015 against $9.8m in 2024. We hold no budgets. We do hold the charts, and from 2022 to 2025 concentration fell rather than rose.
- A Korean company that charts in a country once charts there again, four times as often
Sun Aug 09 — A series charts in 32.9% of countries where its company had already charted and 8.6% where it had not. Comparing each series against itself removes age, strength and size, and the gap widens. It reverses in seven markets, five English.
- Korea's webtoon industry is 396 businesses. Twenty-eight of them earn 64 times what the other 368 do.
Sat Aug 08 — Platforms average ₩94.5bn in revenue; content providers average ₩1.5bn. Three-quarters of all webtoon businesses take less than ₩1bn a year, and 214 of them have fewer than ten staff.
- Korean content companies hold staff half as long. Being younger companies explains some of it, not most of it.
Sat Aug 08 — Content firms average 23.9 years old against 44.3 for the rest of the listed market, and you cannot have long tenure at a young firm. Band companies by their own age and the tenure gap narrows from 1.86× to 1.32× — it never closes.