By Jung Joo-ri and Lee Jihae
Photos = Fandom Research Institute Blip of Space Oddity

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.

Blip said it studied the worldwide viewership of the YouTube videos of 76 K-pop idol acts between July 1 last year and June 30 this year.

The overall number of views such videos garnered worldwide over the cited period was 26.55 billion, with 89.1% of the views coming from abroad.


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%.

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.

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).

"We thought that a new criterion should measure the scale and changes of K-pop fandom, and used the multiplatform YouTube to analyze K-pop-related data," a Blip source said.

The 2019 Global K-pop Map can be found in the link below:

https://www.kpop-radar.com/brief/34

etoilejr@korea.kr