A Korean series fills the encyclopaedia, then empties it. The floor it leaves is a little lower than before

Five titles, before and after

Reads are per million reads of that Wikipedia, summed across Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia. The floor is the six months before the peak and the six after it, skipping two months either side because those are still the wave. Window — 2022-08 through 2026-06, 47 months.

The waves are real and mostly modest — a median of 2.2 times the surrounding months. What happens after them is smaller still, and points down rather than up. We are reporting the median rather than the mean because with five titles one of them moves the mean on its own; the mean here is +0.8%.

The biggest wave is the one we cannot use

Squid Game peaked in 2025-01 at 35.3 times the floor before it — far larger than anything else here, and the reason this question was worth asking. Its floor afterwards looked like it had risen enormously. Then we read the months that floor was made of.

2025-04, 2025-06, 2025-07 are each more than three times the floor before the peak. That is not a floor settling higher, it is the next season arriving inside the window we were using to measure the aftermath. So this title is out of the table above, and the largest wave in the data tells us nothing about what waves leave behind.

Fifteen titles we could not measure, and why

This is most of what we fetched. A question about before-and-after needs a peak with room on both sides of it, and most titles do not have that inside a four-year window.

The peaks are not spread out, which is a problem for the question

5 peaks fall into 3 clusters of neighbouring months, the largest holding 2 of them. If these titles had each risen in their own month we would be measuring titles. Sharing months means we may be measuring those months.

The clusters — 2024-04 · 2025-01 and 2025-02 · 2025-07. 2 of the 5 titles peaked in neighbouring months. A title that peaks when another title peaks may be riding something those months did to these editions rather than anything of its own. We cannot separate the two, and it is the largest reason to treat the table above as a first look rather than an answer.

What this page cannot tell you

We measured 5 titles. That is a small number and it is the number we have: of the twenty we fetched, some have no article in these editions, some peaked too near the edge of the window to have a floor on both sides, one had a second wave sitting where its floor should be, and one had a floor too thin to take a percentage. Every one of them is listed with its reason.

The titles are ones we expected to have had a wave, not the most-read Korean titles and not a random sample. A set chosen this way leans toward titles that travelled.

A read is not a viewer. Someone opening an encyclopaedia article about a series may have watched it, may be deciding whether to, or may have seen the name somewhere and been curious. What this dates is when the looking happened.

We are not saying the wave caused the floor to move, in either direction. Twelve months either side of a peak contain everything else that happened in those months too.

⚠ 2026-07 is excluded. It arrived at 1745 against a mean of 51374.8 over the twelve months before it — Wikimedia's monthly totals were still filling when we fetched, and reading that month as a collapse in attention would have been wrong.

Reads — Wikimedia Pageviews API, human traffic only, monthly.