Preamble

Last month we looked at the number of fan organisations devoted to K-Wave content in Europe as defined by the Korea Foundation (KF), and threatened to revisit the topic looking at numbers of fans. That is exactly what we are going to do. Before embarking on that journey, though, it should be mentioned that the data upon which the visualisations are based can be found here via the KF. It also seems appropriate to go over some of the limitations of the data and the conclusions that can be drawn from it again.

Caveats

The caveats we draw are essentially identical to those we mentioned in the investigation of fan organisations. The fan numbers appear to be derived from an annual census of subscribers to or members of various groups, channels, or other collectivities on a variety of social media platforms. This is not only a contestable definition of what constitutes a fan, but increases the likliehood of counting individuals multiple times, especially if they are active in online fan spaces. We further note that the number of countries included varied by year across the surveyed period, which obscures the timescale over which the growth or decline of the fan population of some countries can be observed. Nevertheless, we persist in seeing this data as representative of global trends of engagement with the K-Wave, albeit in the broadest possible terms.

The European Regional Level

We once more interrogate this data at three levels of spatial resolution. First, we look across the whole region as defined by the KF, then we group the surveyed countries by subregion as defined by the United Nations Geoscheme, before concluding with a breakdown of fan populations by country and year.

While we see in the above graph an increase in fan numbers over the first seven years of the surveyed period, a two year dip, perhaps attributable to an actual reduction in the number of fans, something related to methods of data collection, or even the Covid-19 pandemic, then a bounce back, the rate of change in the number of fans appears to differ from the rate of change in the number of fan organisations. The latter increased somewhat linearly over the first seven years of the survey, while the former enjoyed two periods of relative stability followed by rapid growth in the years 2015/16 and 2018/19. The reasons for these contrasting patterns of growth and those underlying the periods of explosive growth in fan numbers is a matter for future investigation.

Subregional Level

Once more, as last month, we highlight 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.

While the tendency towards an increase in fans across all subregions over the surveyed period did fluctuate, more fans were counted in all subregions in 2022 than in 2012. We further note that the above visualisation reflects some subregional specificity to the periods of rapid growth of K-Wave fans observed across the whole region. In the year 2015/16 we see the number of fans reported for the Eastern Europe subregion increase from under one million to almost four million. Subsequently in 2018/19, we see the fan population of Eastern Europe skyrocket from roughly that number to around twelve million.

Country Level

We now move on to a breakdown of the data by country.

From the above it is plain that Russia is home to the greatest number of K-Wave fans in the region. We further see that it is the growth in the number of fans counted in Russia in the years 2015/16 and 2018/19 which appear to account for the greater part of the striking increase in fan numbers observed at those times for the wider European region. Given its influence on setting the scales for these graphs, it is difficult to get a sense of fan numbers and their change in other countries over the surveyed period. In the interests of providing an impressionistic overview of that, we present the graphs as above once more, but with Russia excluded as an outlier.

This not only gives us an impressionistic overview of how online fan participation has changed in each surveyed country over the surveyed period, but some insight into which countries have particularly large fan populations as well as the subregion in which they are located. Turkiye in Western Asia stands out as having the largest fan population of the surveyed countries excluding Russia, while relatively large fan populations from the late 2010s to the early 2020s can be identified in Kazakhstan (Central Asia), Italy (Southern Europe), and France (Western Europe). While Hungary (Eastern Europe) appeared to have a large fan population in the early 2010s, this appears to have declined. Indeed, more recently no country in Eastern Europe (other than Russia, as discussed above) or Northern Europe appears to be the home of particularly large numbers of people who participate in online K-Wave fandom, either in absolute terms or in the context of the wider European region.

Conclusions

One more thing to observe relates to this article that, at time of writing, appeared recently on the Deutsche Welle website about the alleged decline of the K-Wave. One of the article’s sources is cited asserting that “[a] lot of hallyu culture reached its peak during the COVID pandemic,” and “[w]hen the pandemic ended, some people ‘moved on.’” This position, elaborated in the article, makes a good deal of intuitive sense. When we look at online fan participation specifically for the European region and as reported by the KF, however, we see rather the opposite is the case. This raises the question of whether this pattern is discernible globally. Depending on the answer to this, it would then be worthwhile to investigate what the underlying reasons might be for either reduced online fan participation during the Covid-19 pandemic or for regional (perhaps even national) variation in changes to online fan participation during that period.

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)