Actors with five charting titles are read seven times as often, and that still tells you little about any one of them
An actor with five charting titles is read about ten times as often as an actor with one. How much does that tell you about any one actor?
Of 1023 Korean actors we can measure, those with one charting title are read 0.81 times per million reads of the Indonesian Wikipedia. Those with five or more are read 5.75. The median rises at every step in between. Now pick one actor from each of those two groups at random: the busier one is the more-read one 81.8% of the time.
The ladder
Two columns, because one of them is misleading on its own. The summed column adds an actor's reads across the editions that have an article about them — and actors with more titles have articles in more editions, so that column is partly counting coverage. The one edition column holds coverage constant by looking only at the Indonesian Wikipedia.
| Charting titles | Actors | Summed across editions | One edition only | Has all four articles |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| one | 398 | 1.19 | 0.81 | 14.1% |
| two | 206 | 2.12 | 1.47 | 19.9% |
| three or four | 227 | 4.72 | 2.83 | 21.1% |
| five or more | 192 | 11.89 | 5.75 | 31.8% |
Both columns rise at every step. Summed, the top band is 9.99× the bottom; measured on one edition it is 7.1×. The gap between those two multiples is the part of the raw ladder that was coverage rather than reading. We report the smaller one.
The other way to hold coverage constant is to compare only actors who have an article in all four editions. We do not use it. Having four articles is a consequence of being read, not a fact settled beforehand, so selecting on it changes who is in each band — a collider (Cole et al. 2010). The counts are on this page so you can see how coverage varies, and no median is drawn from them.
What the ladder does not say
A median is a fact about a group. Readers usually want a fact about a person, and those are different sizes. So we also measured the one that answers the second question: take one actor from the top band and one from the bottom band at random, and how often is the busier one the more-read one?
| Measured on | Top band outreads bottom band |
|---|---|
| One edition only | 81.8% |
| Summed across editions | 79.3% |
The chance that a randomly chosen actor from the top band is read more than a randomly chosen actor from the bottom band, counting ties as half. This is the common-language effect size (McGraw and Wong 1992); it equals the Mann-Whitney U statistic divided by the number of pairs (Mann and Whitney 1947). Fifty per cent would mean the bands tell you nothing at all about an individual. A hundred would mean every actor in the top band outreads every actor in the bottom one.
So the bands overlap, heavily. Of the 390 actors with a single charting title, 43 (11%) are read more than the median actor with five or more. Going the other way, 17 of 192 actors with five or more (8.9%) are read less than the median actor with one. A seven-times gap between the middles is not a rule about people at the edges.
Which way does it run?
We do not know, and nothing on this page can settle it. More charting titles may bring more readers. Being read may be what gets an actor cast again. Something we have not measured — an agency, a network, a single breakout year — may drive both. All three would produce the table above.
We have measured the neighbouring question before: whether a title travelling to more countries goes with more lookups. That is on how far a title travelled, and it has the same limit.
How the bands were cut
The four bands are ours. We cut at one, two, three-or-four and five-or-more titles because those splits leave every band with enough actors to measure; a different cut would give different medians.
Every median on this page survives removing any single actor from its band, which rules out one way it could be fragile and does not show that it is stable. The check is a jackknife, which is known to understate how much a median moves, so a swing it finds is real while a swing it misses may be one it cannot see. The method and its limits are here.
What this page cannot tell you
Not cause. We measured that the two go together. Which one moves the other, or whether a third thing moves both, is not on this page and we are not going to guess.
Not about an individual actor. The bands differ, and they still overlap heavily — the figures for that overlap are on this page.
Not every Korean actor. The panel is the cast of titles that reached a Netflix country chart, and an actor who has never been in one is not counted.
Not fame. This counts people opening an encyclopaedia article in four languages.
This is not every Korean celebrity. It is the cast of Korean titles that reached a Netflix country chart, which is the panel the rest of our data is built on. A singer or idol who never appeared in one of those titles is not here.
Reads — Wikimedia Pageviews API, human traffic only, 2025-08 through 2026-07, 12 months, human traffic only. Cast and charting titles — Wikidata and Netflix country charts. Reads are expressed per million reads of that edition, so a small Wikipedia is not penalised for being small.
Card set — free to share
Five cards, 1080×1350. Every figure on them is in the table on this page. Take them.
Fourteen seconds, with sound
Fourteen seconds: the ladder of median reads by number of charting titles, the chance one actor from the top band outreads one from the bottom, and where the two bands overlap. Free to repost with the address on it.
What we wrote from this data
- Five charting shows, seven times the readers, and still no way to guess about one actor
Korean actors with five or more charting titles are read seven times as often as actors with one, across four Southeast Asian Wikipedias. Pick one from each group at random and the busier one wins 82% of the time — a long way from a rule.
16 August 2026