#industry

Thu Sep 24 — School of Performing Arts Seoul has 125 credited alumni with measurable Wikipedia language editions — a median of 13 per person. Seoul Institute of the Arts has 352, nearly three times as many, at a median of 6.

Thu Sep 10 — HYBE sold 17.5% more than the year before and still reported a net loss 85 times larger. SM, JYP and YG all grew revenue and profit. Filed figures, in English, with the filing receipts named.

Tue Sep 08 — Cube, SM and Hybe all had something out this week. For each of nine K-pop companies we hold a reader count, but the share of the roster we can see runs 37% to 67% — so the ranking everyone wants is the one thing the data will not give.

Tue Sep 08 — We cannot measure event economics and do not claim to. We can measure the shape of attention: in one month, 774 Korean acts drew 2.67 million English Wikipedia reads, 24 acts hold half of it, and the lower half of the list holds 3.1%.

Thu Aug 27 — Kim Sang-sik's Vietnam beat Thailand 4-2 on aggregate in Hanoi. We do not count football. What we count is 268 weeks of Netflix country lists — and by that ruler the two finalists are not the same country at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mon Aug 10 — 288 Korean titles charted somewhere in 2022 and 215 in 2025, while the places they held rose 9.7%. Remove each year's biggest title and the ten largest gained 3.1 points — much of the concentration is one show returning.

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.

Sun Aug 09 — The leverage argument runs through cost — $360,000 an episode in 2015 against far more now. We tested what it predicts on the charts. It did not appear.

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.

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.

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.