Korean pop culture, in numbers

Korean pop culture, in numbers

No rumours, no reprints. We count what Netflix and Wikipedia publish, name every source, and say what we left out.

What we hold, and where each one starts

What readers arrive asking

Questions readers actually arrived with, taken from the search terms Google records for this site and rewritten as plain questions. Only questions we already have a page for are listed.

Latest

All 261 articles →

Or by subject — every tag we hold →

How we count, with the row totals: charts that went all Korean · countries that hold the same list · who carries a title first · what “weeks in top 10” counts

What we cover

Every figure above comes out of tables we build and keep. See what is in them →

Looking for Netflix's own Top 10 files? What is inside them, and what is missing from them →

Or go week by week: every week we hold, from 2021-07-04 →

Hold rights to a Korean title? Netflix gives you global hours, not countries. What we can hand over →

The titles that took the most chart places

Counted from Netflix’s own weekly country files. A chart place is not a viewing figure — it shows a title was on Netflix in that country that week, and nothing about how many people watched or what they thought of it.

All 974 Korean titles that charted →

In the Netflix Top 10 across Southeast Asia

Week of 2026-07-26 · Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam · Korean-produced titles only

  1. Agent Kim Reactivated6 of 6 countries · peaked at #1 · TV
  2. Desire6 of 6 countries · peaked at #3 · Films · shared title, 16 countries
  3. Spooky in Love6 of 6 countries · peaked at #3 · TV
  4. The Apartment Job6 of 6 countries · peaked at #4 · TV
  5. Mercy For None4 of 6 countries · peaked at #7 · TV
  6. Wonderful Nightmare1 of 6 countries · peaked at #2 · Films

“Korean-produced” comes from Wikidata’s country-of-origin field — not from where it was watched. International co-productions that list Korea are counted.

“Shared title” means we cannot be sure. We match Netflix’s title text against Wikidata, and some titles name a Korean work and a foreign one at once. Where that is true we say so rather than drop the row or claim it: the flag marks a title we cannot resolve from text alone, not a title we believe is wrong. Across the whole five-year catalogue, 83.6% of the viewing sits on titles only Korean works carry.

See every Korean title that has charted here since 2021 →

Most-watched Korean titles, all time

Netflix global weekly hours viewed, summed since July 2021

  1. Squid Game5048m hours
  2. Extraordinary Attorney Woo662m hours
  3. All of Us Are Dead660m hours
  4. Queen of Tears654m hours
  5. The Glory561m hours
  6. Bon Appétit, Your Majesty512m hours
  7. When Life Gives You Tangerines482m hours
  8. King the Land447m hours
  9. Alchemy of Souls419m hours
  10. Agent Kim Reactivated365m hours

See the full ranking by hours viewed worldwide →

Korean actors drawing the most attention

English Wikipedia page views, 20260705~20260803 · 1,008 actors measured

  1. So Ji-sub233,542 views · 5 titles
  2. Steven Yeun106,201 views · 1 titles
  3. Nam Joo-hyuk101,843 views · 2 titles
  4. Roh Yoon-seo100,832 views · 4 titles
  5. Kim Mu-yeol89,613 views · 10 titles
  6. Park Eun-bin85,503 views · 5 titles
  7. Choi Dae-hoon83,936 views · 4 titles
  8. Son Na-eun78,075 views · 3 titles
  9. Jisoo76,744 views · 1 titles
  10. Joo Sang-wook72,365 views · 4 titles

See the 50 most looked-up actors →

Rising fastest

Last 7 days against the first 7 of the window · at least 300 views this week

  1. Park Jin-young×151.77 · 5,312 views this week
  2. Shin Hae-sun×84.36 · 2,362 views this week
  3. Park Bo-kyung×30.28 · 27,611 views this week
  4. Jin Seon-kyu×11.48 · 28,201 views this week
  5. Jo Hye-joo×6 · 3,991 views this week
  6. Roh Yoon-seo×5.95 · 21,129 views this week
  7. Baek Sun-ho×5.7 · 7,962 views this week
  8. Yang Se-jong×5.52 · 15,838 views this week
  9. Lee Sun-bin×4.99 · 15,139 views this week
  10. Jeon So-young×4.88 · 12,247 views this week

Attention is not popularity. A page climbs for good news and bad. We report the count, not the reason.

Also running: television, not film

Korea reaches Netflix’s global chart with 151 series and 86 films — and collects 22.3 billion hours from the series against 1.5 billion from the films. A quarter of those films go to number one, so it is not that they go unnoticed.

See the split →

Also running: who the English-speaking world looks up in K-pop

Every Korean musician and group with an English Wikipedia article —2,372 of them — counted over 30 days. Attention, not popularity: a page climbs for good news and bad, and we report the count rather than the reason.

See the count →

Also running: your own country’s Korean chart

Netflix publishes a top 10 for 93 markets. We counted the Korean titles in each — how much of the chart they took, how many different titles it was, and which ones stayed longest. 93 of those markets have a page of their own. A market at the median gives Korean titles 4.6% of its places across 101 different titles.

See all 93 markets side by side →

Also running: on the chart, and at the top of it

Every figure above counts chart places, and a place at number one counts the same as a place at number ten. They do not arrive in equal numbers. In the 21 markets where Korean titles hold 5–10% of the chart, they hold only 5.5% of number-one places. In the 10 markets where they are strongest it runs the other way — 36.6% against 27.4% overall.

See the shape at every rank →

Also running: a bigger catalogue, or a further-travelling one

Across 220 companies with a Korean title that has charted, catalogue size tracks how many countries the catalogue reaches between them (r = 0.516) and not how far any one title goes (r = -0.118). A company with 20 or more charting titles gets 11.1 markets out of its median title; one with two gets 13.5.

See the size bands →

Also running: the broadcast run that never happened

Of 287 charting Korean series with a company credit, 238 aired on a Korean television network first and reach a median 4 markets. The 49 with no broadcaster on record reach a median 39. The network titles are still the larger half of the chart — 60.6% of the places — because there are nearly five times as many of them.

See both groups side by side →

Also running: the comeback that was a second season

A Korean title sometimes leaves a country's top 10 and comes back. Of the 924 gaps of 4 weeks or more that end that way, 43.6% carry a different season label — a new season, not a return. Of the 315 genuine returns, 94.3% happen with no other season of the same title anywhere near them, which is not what we expected to find.

See the split, and the thresholds we did not pick →

Who the world is actually reading this month

We measured 1,019 Korean actors and singers by how many people opened their English Wikipedia article in the last 30 days. So Ji-sub is first, Jung Hae-in second, V third — the hundred, in order. We re-measure every month, so it moves.

Readers, not searches. We do not buy keyword data and do not pretend to have it.

And one page per calendar day, so you can start from a birthday you already know: 16 May is IU's, 1 September is Jungkook's, 11 February is ROSÉ's — all 366 days. Sharing a birthday means sharing a birthday, and we say so on every one of them.

Rooms: Korean stars sorted by the day they were born

Not a reading, a count. By birth day there are ten rooms: the day-pillar count across 9,249 Korean entertainers, with the names on ten pages — Jungkook on 丙 byeong, Suga on 己 gi, IU on 丁 jeong. The nine reading rooms are a different axis again — what charted where, who made it, and which titles ran for weeks almost nowhere.

We counted whether any of it picks out who gets famous. It does not. The birth-year spread across 1,047 charting actors is indistinguishable from chance — chi-square 7.77 against a threshold of 19.68, and the names and the test are here. The day-stem spread crossed the 0.05 line by a hair, and we tried four ways to kill it before deciding not to call it a finding.

Where these numbers come from

Not included: other streaming services, which publish no comparable ranking · broadcast ratings · actors with no English Wikipedia article (336 of 1,344 in our roster).

Not affiliated with any agency, label or studio. Riot Games does not endorse or sponsor this project.Updated 2026-09-03 (KST).