#korea

Mon Aug 24 — 976 Korean titles have reached a weekly top 10 somewhere. 438 did it in exactly one country, and for 274 of those the country was South Korea itself. Films stay home far more than series — 37% against 15%.

Sat Aug 22 — We counted the language editions holding an article about each of 9,249 Korean entertainers. Psy leads at 97, ROSÉ of BLACKPINK is at 86, IU at 69. The median is 1, and 365 people have no article in any language.

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.

Sun Aug 16 — Reads of Korean language, hangul, hanbok and taekwondo fell 25.5% across four Southeast Asian Wikipedias in a year. The Japanese equivalents fell 28.2%. Two other genres we measured could not be used at all, and we say why.

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 — Twenty-six Korean titles could be timed from their peak across four Southeast Asian Wikipedias. The median fell below half in two months, nine of them in a single month, and nineteen later rose above half again.

Sat Aug 15 — Across 25 Korean titles with an article on all four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, the Indonesian edition was first or joint-first 24 times and last not once. The Vietnamese edition is larger on every measure we checked.

Sat Aug 15 — Removing a single title left one of our medians exactly where it was and moved the other by 89% of itself. The interquartile range rated the two almost identically. We ran neither before publishing.

Sat Aug 15 — Of 59 Korean titles fetched across four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, nine could be measured before and after their peak. Twenty-two were disqualified because their article did not exist before the title arrived.

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 — 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.

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.

Fri Aug 14 — 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.

Fri Aug 14 — Groups, solo musicians, actors, athletes — the Malay Wikipedia takes 7.6% to 8.6% of the four-country reading for each. For luxury and car brands it takes 23%. Four categories in a narrow band, one well outside it.

Fri Aug 14 — Median reads of a Korean actor's own Wikipedia article, by how many of their titles reached a Netflix chart: 1.21, 2.15, 4.72, 11.94. Yesterday the same panel gave us nothing, because we were measuring the wrong thing.

Thu Aug 13 — Split Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Malay Wikipedia reads by month. All eleven esports players in the panel peak in the same month, and they agree in three of the four years we measured. The footballers never once agree.

Thu Aug 13 — We said Korean esports players in the Southeast Asian Wikipedias all peak in one month. Split by game, 85.7% of them play League of Legends. Korea has more StarCraft II players, and four of them have an article in those editions.

Thu Aug 13 — Chinese, Swedish and American esports players have articles in the Southeast Asian Wikipedias at roughly the rate Korean players do. 9.1% of theirs draw enough reads to measure, against 71.4% of the Korean ones.

Thu Aug 13 — We put 2,511 Korean entertainers, 900 athletes and 22 luxury and car brands on one scale. BTS clears the footballer. Of everyone else measured, nobody does — and the most-read brand sits at a sixth of the leaders.

Thu Aug 13 — We tried to test whether debuting younger buys a wider career. The answer did not come out in one direction, so we went looking for why — and found that for 658 of 1,329 actors, the chart only ever lit them once.

Thu Aug 13 — We measured 1,972 Koreans with one instrument. Son Heung-min sits above all 1,023 actors. But 22 actors clear 100 against two athletes, and the two groups are read in different countries. Musicians who never acted are not in this panel.

Thu Aug 13 — A Korean player is read across Southeast Asia; a Korean manager is read in the one country that hired him. Median concentration in a single country: 50.55% for the players, 81.35% for the managers.

Thu Aug 13 — Four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, twelve months, 926 Korean athletes. Three of the four read almost only football. In the fourth, esports takes 60.6% of the reads and the most-read Korean athlete is not a footballer.

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.

Mon Aug 10 — Two works can carry the same English title, and a chart row does not say which one it is. Thirteen titles in our Korean panel turned out to be foreign works. The test that found them is not the name — it is where they charted.

Mon Aug 10 — Across 210,355 finished runs, a Korean film holds a country chart for 1.96 weeks on average and every other film for 2.02. Korean series run 3.7 weeks against 2.71 — and removing each group's biggest title barely moves it.

Mon Aug 10 — When a Korean title reaches a market's top three, the other Korean titles there fall by 0.403. Non-Korean arrivals cost 0.013. That looks decisive until you notice the two groups start from different heights.

Mon Aug 10 — The animal year and saju are two different things, and Koreans use both. We counted the animal years of 1,047 Korean actors who reached a Netflix chart: chance would put 87.3 in each sign, and the count runs 76 to 103.

Mon Aug 10 — Opening position is the only fact anyone has on the first Monday. Across 8,324 Korean series runs it moves expected length by 0.56 weeks a step — against 0.44 for other series, 0.33 for Korean films and 0.22 for other films.

Mon Aug 10 — Hold run length fixed and most of that gap closes — among titles that lasted five to eight weeks it is 26.6% against 28.6%. Among those that lasted nine weeks or more it does not close: 9.7% against 24%.

Mon Aug 10 — For each of 93 markets we took the median breadth of the Korean titles that reached it. Korea's own chart: 2. Estonia, Slovenia, Switzerland: 77, 76, 72. Most of that gap is how often a market plays Korean titles at all — but not all of it.

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 — Titles with six to ten weeks on Korea's own Netflix chart reached ten countries 56.5% of the time, against 11.4% for those with one or two. But 29 reached twenty countries without ever charting in Korea.

Sun Aug 09 — Everything written about a chart is about getting on it. We measured 11,722 departures instead — the position a Korean title held the week before it vanished, against the 10.0% each rank would take if position did not matter.

Sun Aug 09 — Korean titles hold 7.9% of the world's Netflix top 10 places — 39,612 of 498,480. Of those, 82.3% carry the label we use to exclude same-name foreign works. 16.4% carry no label at all, and we keep them because we cannot check them.

Sun Aug 09 — Between 2022 and 2025 Korean share fell in all ten Asian markets we track, a mean of 9.68 points, and rose in 68 of the other 83. Japan went from 32.6% to 11.2%, and its distinct Korean titles from 62 to 38.

Sun Aug 09 — Among 165 Korean titles that reached 20 countries or more, the first week already holds a median 39.1% of the countries they ever reach. But 57 of them started under 25% and 33 were nearly everywhere at once.

Sun Aug 09 — Across 93 Netflix markets Korean titles hold 7.9% of chart places. In the 20 markets where their share runs 5–10%, they hold only 5.4% of number-one places. In the ten where they are strongest it inverts: 36.6% at number one against 27.4%.

Sun Aug 09 — Korean titles hold 7.9% of Netflix country chart places. Spread evenly that would put at least one on 56.3% of country-weeks; the real figure is 42.0%. Empty weeks run 58.0% against 43.7%, and crowded weeks 4.0% against 0.6%.

Sun Aug 09 — Of 135,036 times a Korean series reached two countries charts, 58.1% arrived in both the same week. Where one did come first, only 1 of 8,333 country triples contradict each other — the markets form one stable order.

Sun Aug 09 — Across 812 Korean actors joined to Netflix's country charts, those with a title in 20+ countries draw 2.91× the median Wikipedia lookups. Match on how many titles they have and how recently they charted, and only one group keeps the gap.

Sun Aug 09 — Of 287 charting Korean series with a company credit, the 238 that aired on a Korean network reach a median 4 markets. The 49 with no broadcaster on record reach 39. They are 17.1% of the titles and 39.4% of the chart places.

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.

Sun Aug 09 — Of 957 gaps of four weeks or more that end with a Korean title back on a country chart, 45.5% carry a different season label — not a return at all. Of the 316 genuine returns, 94.3% happen with no other season nearby.

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.

Sun Aug 09 — Across 220 companies with a charting Korean title, catalogue size tracks total reach (r = 0.516) and not reach per title (r = −0.118). Firms with 20 or more titles get 11.1 markets from the median title; firms with two get 13.5.

Sun Aug 09 — Of 129 companies credited on the 332 Korean series that reached a Netflix country top 10, three account for half. Counting production credits alone — the answer to the obvious objection — it is 5 of 99, on a thinner base of 151 series.

Sun Aug 09 — Netflix attaches hours viewed to 10,720 global chart rows and to 0 of its 499,180 country rows. Knowing a rank narrows the possible hours by 47.3% on the non-English series chart — least of the four, and the one Korean titles sit on.

Sat Aug 08 — They are a different kind of title: 2.21 markets on average against 4.67, and one in seven reaches #1 against one in two. Netflix's Korean chart is not a smaller version of the regional one — it is a different chart.

Sat Aug 08 — Across 1,113 Korean actors and 2,372 K-pop acts, the biggest single day is about 5% of a 30-day month for both. The raw gap of 5.0% against 6.1% disappears once the two groups are compared at the same size.

Sat Aug 08 — Of 700 actors with two or more charting Korean titles, 61.6% have worked in both film and series. If format meant nothing, the figure would be 73.2%. The gap is the size of the wall, and it is smaller than reputation suggests.

Sat Aug 08 — Of the 421 Korean titles that reached Southeast Asia's top 10, Korea's own chart got there first for 51 and in the same week for 165 — and never charted 151 of them at all. Series enter together; films scatter.

Sat Aug 08 — Across 635 charting Korean titles there are 13,558 pairs of actors who have shared a production. 250 of them have done it more than once. Shuffle the same casts at random and you get about 208. The repertory company is mostly not there.

Sat Aug 08 — Across 93 markets, 57.4% of Korean chart runs reach a higher rank than their opening week against 40.5% for everything else. Longer runs give more chances to climb — and the gap holds inside every run-length band.

Sat Aug 08 — In ten of thirteen years the two are within 20% of each other. Their year-on-year growth correlates at −0.13. Two industries arriving at the same number by unrelated routes, until 2024 pulled them apart.

Sat Aug 08 — Riot flags a player on a winning run. Across Korea, Vietnam, Europe West, Japan and Southeast Asia the share sits between 18.7% and 20.0%. North America is 30.8%, on all four days — and the obvious explanation fails.

Sat Aug 08 — Hold the number of titles fixed and the gap is still there: 1,926 English Wikipedia lookups against 1,111. Hold how far the title travelled fixed and it survives that too. Korea's own chart predicts foreign curiosity.

Sat Aug 08 — Measured on all 246 Korean titles instead of the fifty largest, the number-one group runs five weeks to everyone else's two. Hold length fixed and the gap that is left is 1.3× among titles that lasted six to ten weeks.

Sat Aug 08 — We asked Wikidata which countries made something with each of our 397 chart titles. Films come back ambiguous 58.1% of the time, series 23.6%. Short names are the reason, and Korean films get short names — but that is not the whole gap.

Sat Aug 08 — Across 93 markets the typical Asian one has charted 247 different Korean titles and the typical market elsewhere 85. Matching markets by how many Korean places they hold removes a third of that gap. Two-thirds of it survives.

Sat Aug 08 — Korean series account for more casting slots than films here — 1,804 against 1,611. But among the 30 actors with ten or more charting titles, film outnumbers series 263 to 109.

Sat Aug 08 — Four countries, one identical decline: new group debuts look 69% down since 2017 in Korea, and just as far down in Japan, America and Britain. What we had measured was not the industry but how fast Wikidata records a new group.

Sat Aug 08 — Across 93 countries and 265 weeks the global share has not moved since 2022. That average hides nine Asian markets where Korean titles held 30.3% of places and now hold 19.5% — all nine fell, and Korea's own chart did not.

Sat Aug 08 — Riot flags 54% of Korea's challengers as veterans of the tier and 29.4% of its grandmasters. In North America it is 36.8% and 13%. The top tier is where players stay everywhere — how much more it stays differs by region.

Sat Aug 08 — Month by month, Korean titles hold between 6.6% and 9.1% of the world's top-10 places. Remove each month's biggest title and the band gets wider, not narrower. What moves this number is releases, not the calendar.

Sat Aug 08 — Broadcasting holds staff 10.3 years, film 7.3, publishing and games 5.4. Pay runs the other way from what that suggests: film pays ₩63.1m against publishing's ₩77.4m while keeping people longer.

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 — Sixty-nine titles share an actor with Squid Game directly. Another 432 are one further step away. Out of 635 Korean titles with a recorded cast, 502 sit within two shared actors of one show.

Sat Aug 08 — Being in League of Legends' top 300 means 2,623 LP in Europe West and 1,061 in Southeast Asia. The distance between the top two tiers barely moves — 484 to 618 LP everywhere. The ladder's height varies; its step does not.

Sat Aug 08 — Wikidata records no cast at all for 266 of 901 Korean titles. Of the 635 that have any, the median series lists five people and the median film four. Here is what that does to every figure we publish from it.

Sat Aug 08 — Our panel never had a denominator. Wikidata records 784 Korean series and 1,122 Korean films from the chart era; 248 series and 173 films reached a Top 10. Series are twice as likely to be seen at all.

Sat Aug 08 — Film, video and audio production is 56.9% women. Publishing and games is 34.1%. Both sit above the whole listed market. The 22.8-point gap inside one sector is the larger fact and the filings do not explain 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.

Fri Aug 07 — 214 of 421 titles never reached a global Top 10, so Netflix's language label — the only thing that separates a Korean work from a foreign one with the same name — cannot be applied to them. They are also the small ones.

Fri Aug 07 — Korean titles have drawn between 74 and 79 million hours a week from Netflix's global chart in every year that did not carry a Squid Game release. Over the same span, music and broadcast exports went from $1.88bn to $3.06bn.

Fri Aug 07 — Europe West's challengers average 921 ranked games to Korea's 770 and Southeast Asia's 410. In five of six regions you play more to reach the top tier. In Vietnam you play less, on all four days measured.

Fri Aug 07 — In 2012 the two were the same size to within half a percent. Broadcast was ahead again as recently as 2022. In 2024 music pulled to $1.80bn against $1.26bn, the widest gap in thirteen years.

Fri Aug 07 — Terrestrial broadcasters were 81.5% of Korea's TV exports in 2012 and 7.2% in 2024. Their staff average 10.3 years of service — the longest in Korean content. The producers who took the trade average 5.4 to 7.3.

Fri Aug 07 — One Netflix title is 21.3% of all Korean viewing. The most looked-up Korean actor is 3.1% of all attention. And within the fifty most-searched, appearing in more charting titles does not predict being looked up more.

Fri Aug 07 — Actors in ten or more charting Korean titles are looked up eight times as often as those in one. We said in August that the rise stops at ten. It does not. The busiest are still not the most read: 21 titles against Steven Yeun's one.

Fri Aug 07 — Of 668 Korean titles with a recorded cast, 651 form a single connected body through shared actors. We expected a few very busy people to be holding it together. Take out the 100 busiest and 94.6% is still one piece.

Fri Aug 07 — Among the 232 Korean titles Netflix has verifiably filed as Non-English, the median series charted in 35 countries and the median film in 11. Series also last longer — but the country gap is the one runtime cannot explain.

Fri Aug 07 — Of 397 Korean titles that reached a Netflix Top 10 in Southeast Asia since 2021, 45.1% charted in all six countries and 30.7% in exactly one. Series average 4.6 countries; films average 2.6.

Fri Aug 07 — For the typical act, the biggest single day is 5.5% of a 30-day month. For the ten largest names the median is 11.0%. BTS sits at 25.1%, and all six of its measurable members peaked on the same date.

Fri Aug 07 — 232 of the 1,550 individuals in our K-pop panel also appear in Korean titles that reached a Netflix Top 10. They are 15% of the names and 41% of the attention. Removing them does not correct the list. It produces a second one.

Fri Aug 07 — Across 86 groups whose full membership can be measured, the members' pages were opened 3.88 times as often as the group's. Newer groups looked like the opposite until we checked why: Wikidata lists two members for Fromis 9.

Fri Aug 07 — The weekly charts carry nine columns and none is country of production. Match titles by name, as everyone must, and 17% of Korean viewing sits on names another country also uses. We measured the gap and publish its size.

Fri Aug 07 — Our Korean Netflix catalogue was 294 titles and 27.7 billion hours. It is 236 and 23.7 billion. Here is the mistake, how it spread, why counting alone would never have caught it, and what we changed so it cannot happen the same way twice.

Fri Aug 07 — Across 312 Korean productions with five or more recorded cast, the median has 16.7% of its cast appearing in nothing else that charted. The spread runs from 0% to 89%, and it separates prestige work from reality and youth casting.

Thu Aug 06 — Korea's top 300 League of Legends players win 53.65% of their ranked games — the lowest of six regions, on all four days we have measured. A win rate at the top is set by who you have to play, and in Korea that is everybody else.

Thu Aug 06 — 396 webtoon businesses were surveyed in 2024. The 28 platforms average ₩94.5bn each; the 368 content providers average ₩1.5bn. The average describes almost nobody, and the studios that draw the comics sit at the bottom of it.

Thu Aug 06 — Korean music exports went from $22m in 2005 to $1.80bn in 2024. Japan's share more than halved — but Japanese sales grew 1.7× since 2018 while North America grew 39×. The concentration broke because everywhere else caught up.

Thu Aug 06 — Five years of Netflix's global Top 10 hold 23.7 billion hours of Korean viewing. Squid Game is 21.3% of it, the 50 biggest titles are nearly three-quarters, and reaching number one multiplies a show's hours without lengthening its run.

Thu Aug 06 — Netflix's Korean catalogue has been watched 23.7 billion hours. The listed companies in that business keep staff 5.5 years against 11.3 across Korea's listed market — and their two halves are mirror-image workforces.