K Culture WireKorean pop culture, in numbers

Which ranking is the real one?

Name: Squid Game is number one by hours. By countries it is number 2, and All of Us Are Dead is first
Creator: K Culture Wire

Netflix publishes one ranking of Korean titles: hours viewed, worldwide. By that ruler Squid Game is first, with 5.05bn hours. It is the number everybody quotes.

We counted two more rulers from Netflix’s own country files — how many countries a title charted in, and how many weeks it stayed on a chart. Change the ruler and the order comes apart. Of the top 15 by hours, 11 move at least three places. When Life Gives You Tangerines is number 7 by hours and number 89 by countries — 82 places apart.

Before the table: these three rulers do not measure the same thing, and we are not saying one of them is wrong. Hours viewed is a worldwide total Netflix publishes itself. Countries and weeks come from the separate per-country top 10 files. A title can pile up enormous hours in a few large markets, or spread thinly across ninety. Neither of those is more real than the other. What we are showing is that the word “biggest” hides a choice, and the choice is usually made for you.

The same 15 titles, three rulers

Ordered by hours — Netflix’s own ranking. The two columns beside it are where the same title lands when you count countries, or weeks.

Title	By hours	By countries	By weeks	Countries reached
Squid Game	1	2	5	93
Extraordinary Attorney Woo	2	49	11	57
All of Us Are Dead	3	1	13	93
Queen of Tears	4	74	27	46
The Glory	5	7	17	91
Bon Appétit, Your Majesty	6	19	74	79
When Life Gives You Tangerines	7	89	30	43
King the Land	8	50	26	55
Alchemy of Souls	9	76	7	45
Agent Kim Reactivated	10	18	145	81
Bloodhounds	11	12	40	87
Love Next Door	12	56	59	53
My Demon	13	37	33	66
Dynamite Kiss	14	62	155	52
Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha	15	97	14	40

Pink figures in the “by countries” column are titles that move three or more places from their position by hours.

The two titles the hours ranking never shows you

All of Us Are Dead reached 93 countries — more than any other Korean title we hold. I am Solo spent 112 weeks on country top 10s, the longest run of any of them, and it is nowhere near the top of the hours list. If you had only ever seen the hours ranking, you would not know either fact.

So which one counts?

A show watched enormously in a handful of countries, or a show that charted in ninety and never topped any of them — which one travelled further? There is a real answer for whatever you are trying to decide, and it is not the same answer for a distributor, a subtitler and a fan. We are not going to pick one for you.

What do you think?

No cookie, no IP, no third-party tracker — we built this ourselves.

What we wrote from this data

Squid Game leads by hours, All of Us Are Dead by countries
Netflix publishes one ranking of Korean shows: hours viewed. Count countries instead and 11 of the top 15 move at least three places. Extraordinary Attorney Woo goes from 2nd to 49th.
31 August 2026

How this was measured

Hours viewed — Netflix's own published global top 10, 2021-07-04~2026-08-16, 237 Korean titles, 24.0 billion hours in total
Countries and weeks — Netflix per-country weekly top 10 files, counted by us
Titles shown — The top 15 by hours that we also hold a page for
Measured — 2026-08-31 19:27

What this cannot tell you

Different rulers — Hours is a worldwide total; countries and weeks come from per-country charts. They are not the same measurement and we do not treat one as the correction of the other.
Not viewers — Hours viewed is hours, not people. Netflix publishes no viewer counts and no per-country hours at all.
Not availability — A title absent from a country chart may still have been available there. Charting is not availability.
Our own panel — Which titles count as Korean is our inference — Netflix states no country of production. 0 of the hours top 15 are not in our table, and we left them out rather than scoring them zero.

The same three counts power the ranking columns on every title page.