Korean pop culture, in numbers

How much of the world's Netflix top 10 is Korean

Netflix publishes twenty places per country per week — ten films, ten series. It is a fixed pie, which makes it one of the few things about the Korean wave that can be counted rather than asserted. We counted 93 countries with a complete record across 265 weeks, 2021-07-04 to 2026-07-26.

Of the top-10 places Netflix publishes around the world, how many hold a Korean title — and is that share growing?

7.7% of the world, and half of Korea

All 93 markets7.7%37,750 of 492,900 places
The median country4.5%half the markets sit below this
South Korea itself49.7%in 2025

Korea's own figure surprises people first. Even at home, in the market where every Korean release lands and the audience needs no subtitles, fewer than half of Netflix's top-10 places hold a Korean title.

Where the share is high, and where it is not

Korean shareMarketsWhich
20% and above10South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Philippines, Singapore, Japan
10–20%11Bangladesh, Peru, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bolivia, Nigeria and 5 more
5–10%23Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Honduras, India, El Salvador, Morocco and 17 more
3–5%18Réunion, Kenya, Lebanon, Martinique, New Caledonia, Greece and 12 more
2–3%22Hungary, New Zealand, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Belgium, Germany and 16 more
0–2%9Latvia, Norway, Estonia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Denmark, Ireland, United States, Iceland

Every market in the top band is in East or Southeast Asia. The bottom band is northern Europe and the English-speaking world. These are bands, not a league table — we are not ranking 93 countries against one another, and the order inside a band carries no meaning we would defend.

The global share has not moved

YearWeeksKorean share
2022527.6%
2023537.9%
2024527.0%
2025527.7%

Four complete years, and the share ends where it started. Only complete calendar years are used here. 2021 has 26 weeks and 2026 has 30 weeks, so they are reported separately rather than blended into a trend (2021: 8.5%, 2026: 7.7%).

What that average hides

Group2022202320242025
South Korea49.8%54.3%51.2%49.7%
The nine Asian markets that were once above 20%30.3%26.0%19.7%19.5%
The five largest English-speaking markets1.9%1.3%1.9%2.0%

The 9 markets where Korean titles were strongest gave up 10.8 points in four years — better than a third of the share they held. The English-speaking markets did not pick it up. The global average stayed flat because 9 countries falling is a small thing inside an average of 93.

All 9 fell. That is the finding, not the order.

Market20222025Change
Vietnam34.1%24.2%−9.9
Indonesia34.1%24.9%−9.2
Malaysia31.3%20.1%−11.2
Taiwan27.1%20.3%−6.8
Thailand30.4%18.9%−11.5
Hong Kong27.5%18.6%−8.9
Philippines27.6%19.3%−8.3
Singapore27.8%18.3%−9.5
Japan32.6%11.2%−21.4

There is no exception. One market falling is a market. All of them falling, across a range of languages, incomes and neighbouring content industries, is the same thing happening to all of them. We print every one rather than the worst or the best.

Fewer titles, not shorter runs

YearKorean shareKorean titles chartingPlaces per Korean titleAll titles charting
202230.3%16117.61,127
202326.0%13917.81,158
202419.7%10018.51,248
202519.5%10217.91,247

A share can fall two ways: the same titles hold fewer places each, or fewer titles get in at all. It is the second. Distinct Korean titles fell from 161 to 102, while what each one did once it arrived barely changed (17.6 places to 17.9). Meanwhile the total number of distinct titles charting rose from 1,127 to 1,247.

The control: Korea's own chart

There is an obvious way this page could be wrong. We identify Korean titles through Wikidata, and Wikidata records a new title later than Netflix charts it. If our recognition were quietly decaying, recent years would look emptier of Korean content whether or not anything changed. Korea's own chart tests that, because it is measured with exactly the same identification — and it is the chart most densely packed with Korean titles, so a decaying ruler would shorten here first and hardest.

Market2022202320242025
South Korea49.8%54.3%51.2%49.7%

It does not sag. It ends within a tenth of a point of where it started while the nine markets lost more than ten points, so whatever moved was not the ruler.

The peaks are one title

WeekKorean shareKorean placesLargest single title
2025-07-0616.1%300Squid Game — 240, 80.0%
2025-01-0515.2%282Squid Game — 186, 66.0%
2024-12-2915.1%280Squid Game — 186, 66.4%
2024-11-102.0%37A Virtuous Business — 8, 21.6%

The last row is the lowest week in the record: across 93 countries and 1,860 published places, Korean titles held 37. The highest week in five years is four-fifths one show. What moves the global figure is not a rising tide of Korean content — it is whether one enormous title happens to be out. The full story →

Is there a season?

Does the Korean share of the world's top-10 places have a season?

MonthKorean shareWithout that month’s biggest titleThat title
January8.4%6.8%Squid Game 20.4% of the month
February7.6%6.7%All of Us Are Dead 12.6% of the month
March7.4%6.8%The Glory 7.8% of the month
April7.8%7.1%Bloodhounds 10% of the month
May7%6.5%My Royal Nemesis 6.4% of the month
June6.7%6.2%Hierarchy 7.4% of the month
July8.5%7.3%Squid Game 15.6% of the month
August7.7%7.3%Extraordinary Attorney Woo 6.3% of the month
September8.8%8.2%Bon Appétit, Your Majesty 7.4% of the month
October7.9%6.9%Squid Game 13.8% of the month
November6.6%5.8%Squid Game 13.4% of the month
December7.4%6.6%Squid Game 11.6% of the month

The whole monthly range is 2.2 points — 6.6% in November to 8.8% in September, against 7.7% for the year. Remove each month’s own biggest title and the band becomes 2.4, so the swing is not one title. Squid Game is the biggest Korean title in 5 of the twelve months.

Set that against the weekly figures above: 2% to 16.1% is a range of 14.1 points, 6.4 times the monthly one. The calendar is not what moves this number. The full story →

How much of this figure is confirmed, and how much is only unrefuted

A title enters this count because its name matches a Korean work in Wikidata. The rule that keeps foreign works of the same name out is Netflix's own Non-English label — but that label exists only on the global charts. A title that never reached a global top 10 has nothing to check against, so we keep it. That is not the same as confirming it.

Of the 37,750 Korean chart placesPlacesShare
Carry Netflix's Non-English label — checked31,14382.5%
No label at all — kept because we could not check6,07816.1%
Label says both — the name is on an English chart too5291.4%

We had published the title count for years and never this one. Saying "197 titles carry no label" sounds like a rounding error; saying 16.1% of the places behind our headline figure rest on titles we could not check does not. Both are true, and the second is the one that matters when you are deciding whether to use the number.

Netflix labels a title Non-English on its global charts, and that is the label we use to exclude English-language works with the same name. Country charts carry no such label, so a title that never reached a global top 10 has nothing to check against. We keep those rather than drop them, and this is how much of the total rests on them.

A second, independent check. The language label asks whether a title isnot English. It does not ask which work this is. For that we hold a Wikidata item number, matched by number rather than by name — and 99% of the places above sit on titles that have one. The remaining 379 places (1%) entered on a name match alone.

The two checks catch different things and neither is a superset of the other, which is why both are printed. A title can carry a Wikidata number and still have no language label, and the reverse happens too.

What we wrote from this data

Where these numbers come from, and what they cannot answer

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