HOW POPULAR KPOP IN SOUTH EAST ASIA and ALL OVER THE WORLD

A "global K-pop map" showing the distribution of global viewership of K-pop clips was released on Aug. 21 by Blip, a private data research organization. Since the late 1990s, an increasing amount of Korean popular cultural content including television dramas, movies, pop songs and their associated celebrities have gained immense popularity across East and Southeast Asian countries. News media and trade magazines have recognized the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia by dubbing it the ‘Korean wave’ (Hallyu in Korean).

The popularity of each K-pop act differed depending on continent. Super boy band BTS saw the most views in the U.S. with 30.6% and Europe with 27.9%, while the girl group Blackpink had the highest viewership in Asia with 19%. According to data on K-pop popularity based on YouTube views, only 10.1 percent of the total number of views came from South Korea, the homeland of K-pop. In terms of audience share, the country was followed by Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the United States. K-pop's popularity in the global music market was led by BTS, Blackpink, TWICE, Momoland, and EXO

The city with the highest viewership of K-pop YouTube clips was Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, with the average person viewing the clips 393.2 times. Second was Bangkok, Thailand, with 115.1, beating out Seoul (91.1), followed by Jakarta, Indonesia, (73.2) and Singapore (34.2).

The countries with the highest viewership were Indonesia (2.62 billion views, 9.9%), Thailand (2.15 billion, 8.1%), Vietnam (1.96 billion, 7.4%) and the U.S. (1.95 billion, 7.4%), showing the high popularity of K-pop in Southeast Asia.

It is reported that the Korean Wave started in China sometime around 1997 when the Korean television drama What is Love All About? made a huge hit after its broadcast on the China Central Television Station (CCTV). It recorded the second-highest ratings ever in the history of Chinese television (Heo, 2002). Following this unexpected performance, a series of other Korean dramas have captivated Chinese audiences. Since then, Korean television dramas have rapidly taken up airtime on television channels in countries such as Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia which saw media liberalization beginning in the 1990s. In addition, the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s brought about a situation where Asian buyers preferred the cheaper Korean programming; Korean television dramas were a quarter of the price of Japanese ones, and a tenth of the price of Hong Kong television dramas as of 2000 (Lee, 2003). Korean television programming export figure has increased so dramatically that in 2007, it reached US$150.95 million, from US$12.7 million in 1999 (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2008).