- BTS members hometowns: V and Suga from Daegu, Jungkook and Jimin from Busan, not one from Seoul
Sat Aug 22 — Seoul is the birthplace of 50 of the 123 most-read Korean stars we could place — 41% from one city. BTS is the counterexample: six members, four cities, none of them the capital.
- We built the day pillar for 9,249 Korean entertainers — IU, Jungkook, RM and BTS included
Sat Aug 22 — English saju sites read one chart at a time, so nobody has a denominator. We built one: 9,249 Korean entertainers with a birth date on record to the day. One of our four tests crossed the chance line; here is what we did to kill it.
- 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.
- Ma Dong-seok and Park Ji-hwan share four Netflix Top 10 titles. Only 1.8% of Korean pairs ever repeat
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.
- New K-pop groups look 69% down. So does every other kind
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- K-pop members outdraw their own groups four to one, and the BTS exception was a hole in Wikidata
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.
- 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.