- Nearly three in ten Korean titles that reached a Netflix top 10 never left home
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%.
- Squid Game lost half its readers in one month. Goblin took seven
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.
- You cannot ask what a Korean hit leaves behind. The article is born with the show
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.
- Korean film and television share actors freely — but less freely than chance alone would produce
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.
- Lee Byung-hun, Ma Dong-seok and Ha Jung-woo: the busiest names on Netflix Korea are film actors
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.
- Two hops from Squid Game reaches 79% of every Korean title Netflix has charted
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.
- Everything we can say about Korean casting rests on a median of five recorded names per title
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.
- Half the titles in our Southeast Asia panel cannot be verified as Korean. Here is exactly how big that is.
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.
- Korea's content exports grew 63% in two years. Its viewing at the top of Netflix did not move.
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.
- Korea exports more music than television — but only just, and not always
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.
- Korea's television exports moved to companies where people stay half as long
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.
- Ma Dong-seok has 21 charting titles and Steven Yeun has one. Steven Yeun is read twice as much
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.
- Remove Ma Dong-seok, Hwang Jung-min and 98 more, and Korean Netflix is still one connected body
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.
- Korean series reach three times as many countries as Korean films, and the gap is not about runtime
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.
- In Southeast Asia a Korean title charts in all six countries or in one. There is little in between.
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.
- Rank Korean musicians by look-ups and IU is not first — the top name is there for acting
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.
- Netflix never says where a show is from — our counts are inferences too
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.
- Every credited name in Parasite appears in another charting Korean title. In The Influencer, one does.
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.
- 236 Korean titles have charted on Netflix worldwide. One of them is a fifth of all the viewing.
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.
- Korea's listed pop-culture companies employ 15,072 people. They stay half as long as the rest of the market.
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.