Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia each keep their own Korean reading list. Who is first on each one?
BTS is the most-read Korean act on 3 of the four Southeast Asian Wikipedias — Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia — at 133.45, 130.09 and 33.93 reads per million. Indonesia's list opens with someone else: Babymonster, at 94.02.
| # | Name | Reads per million |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Babymonster | 94.02 |
| 2 | BTS | 83.29 |
| 3 | V | 79.18 |
| 4 | Lee Hee-seung | 65.86 |
| 5 | Seunghan | 61.77 |
| 6 | EXO | 53.91 |
| 7 | Cha Eun-woo | 51.85 |
| 8 | DPR Ian | 49.16 |
| 9 | Im Yoon-ah | 48.75 |
| 10 | Mark Lee | 48.38 |
Read here and nowhere else in this table: Lee Hee-seung, Seunghan, DPR Ian, Mark Lee.
| # | Name | Reads per million |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | BTS | 133.45 |
| 2 | Babymonster | 117.3 |
| 3 | V | 85.14 |
| 4 | T.O.P | 76.81 |
| 5 | EXO | 71.29 |
| 6 | IU | 68.06 |
| 7 | Hari Won | 62.79 |
| 8 | Bae Suzy | 60.81 |
| 9 | Jang Won-young | 58.47 |
| 10 | Tomorrow X Together | 57.91 |
Read here and nowhere else in this table: T.O.P, Hari Won, Jang Won-young, Tomorrow X Together.
| # | Name | Reads per million |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | BTS | 130.09 |
| 2 | Im Yoon-ah | 96.6 |
| 3 | Babymonster | 87.36 |
| 4 | IU | 82.08 |
| 5 | EXO | 77.27 |
| 6 | Cha Eun-woo | 68.57 |
| 7 | Bae Suzy | 59.14 |
| 8 | Jungkook | 57.39 |
| 9 | Jennie | 55.42 |
| 10 | Jisoo | 53.39 |
Read here and nowhere else in this table: Jungkook, Jennie, Jisoo.
| # | Name | Reads per million |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | BTS | 33.93 |
| 2 | Cha Eun-woo | 24.11 |
| 3 | Stray Kids | 22.96 |
| 4 | Ahyeon | 21.07 |
| 5 | Ahn So-hee | 20.93 |
| 6 | Riize | 19.85 |
| 7 | SISTAR | 19.37 |
| 8 | Cho Kyuhyun | 19.28 |
| 9 | Ateez | 18.31 |
| 10 | Kim Jae-joong | 16.97 |
Read here and nowhere else in this table: Stray Kids, Ahyeon, Ahn So-hee, Riize, SISTAR, Cho Kyuhyun, Ateez, Kim Jae-joong.
Of the 40 places across the four tables, exactly 1 name appears in every one of them: BTS. Everything else is a country's own. Thailand reads Im Yoon-ah second and Malaysia reads Cha Eun-woo second, and neither name is in the other's top 10.
Some Wikidata items carry no label we could read, so the name arrives as a Q number. One of them sat sixth on the Vietnamese list. We drop them rather than print a Q number as if it were a person, and we say how many we dropped.
Dropped for this reason: 1 of the 1,701 acts in the panel (Q27655344).
Not popularity. An article is opened by fans, by people who just heard a name, and by people checking a fact. We cannot tell them apart.
Not a contest between countries. Reads are per million reads of that edition, so the four columns share a scale, but a smaller Wikipedia has a smaller and differently shaped readership.
Not why. We can show that the name at the top in Indonesia is not the one the other three share, and we did not measure what put it there.
Reads — Wikimedia Pageviews API, human traffic only, 2025-08 through 2026-07, 12 months, human traffic only, expressed per million reads of that edition so a small Wikipedia is not penalised for being small. Article links — Wikidata.
The same acts against athletes · What gets read in all four · How we count