What this was measured on. 4 Wikipedias — the Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Malay editions — which are the ones read in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. Someone read mostly in another language is under-counted here, and we do not correct for it.
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
94 countries have given a Korean title Netflix's number one place. The median country has done it for two titles, ever. Only eight have had five or more, and all eight are in Asia.
1 September 2026
Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia each keep their own Korean reading list. BTS leads three of them, and is the only name on all four. Cha Eun-woo, IU, Im Yoon-ah and Stray Kids are each in some and not others.
20 August 2026
Four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, four lists of Korean actors, three different names at the top. Byeon Woo-seok, Kim Seon-ho and Cha Eun-woo appear on every list — and not one of them is first anywhere.
20 August 2026
Reads are expressed per million reads of that Wikipedia in that month, so that a large edition and a small one can be compared without the larger one winning by size alone. Each edition is ranked on its own and never pooled, because pooling produces a single winner and hides that the four lists disagree.
Dividing by an edition's own total means a month when that edition was unusually busy lowers every article in it. The ratio measures share of attention inside an edition, not how many people read something. This counts people opening an encyclopaedia article, which is not liking an act, buying a ticket, or streaming a song. It cannot see an act with no article in that language: absence here means no article or no reads, and we do not separate those two. The ranking covers one twelve-month window, so a comeback inside that window can lift an act above one that was steadier all year.
Korean singers, rappers, idols and songwriters, plus Korean bands and groups. That is the whole rule — nobody was added by hand for being famous, and nobody was dropped for being unfamiliar.