Preamble

Over the last few months, we have seen the extent to which K-Wave cultural products are consumed globally in 2023. K-Wave screen media enjoy global distribution through internationally available streaming platforms and accrue a striking number of viewing hours on international streaming services, especially in comparison to other screen media produced in languages with considerably larger first and second language speaking populations. K-Pop is now an unsurprising feature of music charts in the US. Individual releases have reached peak chart positions and had considerable longevity in the charts. What’s more, the chart success of K-Pop in general seems to be growing, albeit attributable in large part to the success of a single label.

This month, we’re changing focus to another way of measuring the the K-Wave: fan participation.

지구촌 한류현황 (Global Hallyu Status)

The data we’ll be using comes from the Korea Foundation (hereafter the KF). The organisation was called into existence by legislation passed in South Korea in 1991 and its purposes are, in its own words, “to promote proper awareness and understanding of Korea, and to enhance goodwill and friendship throughout the international community through a diverse array of international exchange activities, in pursuant to Article 1 of the Korea Foundation Act” (more details here).

Among their many activities, is monitoring and reporting on global engagement with the K-Wave. This has been going on since 2012 and since 2013 their findings are disseminated through the reports entitled “지구촌 한류현황 - Global Hallyu Status”, which can be found here. At time of writing we are still awaiting the publication of the report on 2023, so will restrict our discussion here to the nice, round feeling, eleven-year period of 2012-2022.

There is data covering the number of fan organisations and the number of fans. Both of these require some quite heavy caveats. Fan organisations are those which can be found online on large social media site such as Facebook, Youtube, or Instagram, as well as regionally or nationally specific sites such as Russia’s VK (ВКонтакте - ‘VKontakte’, a social network somewhat analogous to Facebook). Fans appear to be counted in terms of number of members of or subscribers to online groups, organisations, channels, etc. Given the very high likelihood that this will count numerous individuals multiple times, it is questionable whether we can draw firm conclusions about the global population of K-Wave fans, even when we take the contestable position that participation in an online fan community is the sole and appropriate definition of being a K-Wave fan. Rather, we see the online footprint of the K-Wave and its following as representative of global trends of engagement with it, albeit in the broadest possible terms.

For this month, we’re restricting our scope in terms of measure and in terms of geographic coverage. Our measure will be fan organisations rather than the ‘number of fans’. Bearing all the caveats above in mind, we shall look at that next month. Geographically, we will look only at Europe as defined by the KF. The motivation for this is twofold. Firstly, there is visualisation and analysis of the global situation provided by the KF here, where, incidentally, the relevant data can also be found. Secondly, Europe is somewhat overlooked in the study of the K-Wave in comparison to Asia and North America, so hopefully this will fill a gap in our collective knowledge of the K-Wave.

Let’s see, then, how the reported number of fan organisations changed over the eleven years of data we have available.

From this graph, we can see that the number of K-Wave fan organisations in Europe grew over the first seven years of the surveyed period, dipping slightly in 2020 then precipitously in 2021, before once more climbing in 2022. This makes a good deal of intuitive sense, although the whether the reason for the dip can be attributed to an actual reduction in the number of fan organisations, something related to methods of data collection, or the Covid-19 pandemic remains an open question.

Subregional Level

Something we mentioned above is that we are restricting ourselves to Europe ‘as defined by the KF’. There are a variety of ways to divide the world into regions, and classifying the countries that fall within the KF’s definition of Europe into regionally defined groups could give us some more information about the distribution of fan organisations across this space. Here, we classify the countries surveyed according to their subregion in the United Nations Geoscheme (Wikipedia overview here) . We do note, however, that the KF’s definition of Europe differs from that of the UN, in that the former includes countries that the latter considers to be in Central or Western Asia, hence the inclusion of those regions in the following graph.

From the above, we can see that while the number of fan organisations grew in every region, albeit with some fluctuation, over the surveyed period, Eastern Europe stands out for the scale and size of its increase.

Country Level

For even greater geographical specificity, we examine the number of fan organisations over the surveyed region and period by country, as in the bar charts for each surveyed year below, with the bars still filled to reflect region within Europe as defined by the KF.

From this, we can see that the outstanding contributors to the growth in the number of fan organisations over the surveyed period were Hungary and Russia. The reasons underlying the striking difference in online fan expression and participation between these two countries and the others presented here are not known. While it is tempting to appeal to factors such and population to account for the large number of fan organisations, there are many counterexamples to this in the data presented. For example, Hungary has a significantly smaller population than Russia, yet often had a larger number of fan organisations (e.g., between 2015 and 2019). The specifics of the online fan activity of these two countries, then, certainly merit exploration.

Conclusions

There is good reason to believe that the number of fan organisations devoted to various aspects of the K-Wave has grown in Europe over the 2010s and into the early 2020s. While the rising headline figure intuitively reflects the growing interest in and profile of the K-Wave in the region, when the data is interrogated on the subregional or national level, we can see that a large proportion of both the amount and increase in the number of fan organisations over the surveyed period can be attributed to two just two countries: Hungary and Russia. This raises the interesting question of precisely what the reason is for K-Wave engagement in these countries taking the specific form which is so impactful for the KF surveys, i.e., the formation of online fan organisations.

An additional caveat raised by examining the surveys on the national level is the increase in the number of countries to be included. The 2012 data covers 26 countries, while the 2022 report includes information on 36. Nevertheless, as Hungary and Russia are among the countries to have been included in the survey since 2012, it is doubtful that the inclusion of more countries led to an appearance of a growth in the number of fan organisations which was entirely illusory.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250004)