Preamble

The second season of Squid Game came out in late December 2024. Its critical reception was initially decidedly lukewarm, but the available data suggests that it still attracts a large viewership. We will need to wait some time before we can see if it enjoys the same kind of sustained popularity as the first season. The average time the first season spent in the top ten for most viewed non-feature-length titles before the launch of the second season across the countries for which Netflix provides data was just over 15 weeks. That was a milestone we hit towards the beginning of April. Given the long tail on the distribution to give us an average of 15 weeks in the top ten (as we shall shortly see!), let’s give it a little more time before directly comparing the different seasons of the show. Perhaps we can revisit the question one day in light of viewer engagement with the third season? For now, though, we will restrict ourselves to reviewing engagement with the first season. In so doing, we provide a basis for comparison for engagement with the subsequent seasons.

Time in Netflix Top 10

Above, we noted that the average time the first season spent in the top ten most viewed non-feature-length titles for the countries for which Netflix collects data was a little over 15 weeks. The data Netflix releases about global performance is partitioned into top ten lists about English-language and Non-English-language titles, so is not wholly comparable, but following its release on 17th September 2021, the first season of Squid Game spend 19 consecutive weeks in the top ten most viewed non-English-language titles on Netflix including a nine week stretch at number one.

These kinds of global, aggregate summary measures, though, can obscure as much as they reveal. The distribution of time spent in national top tens that we have alreasy mentioned is and example of this kind of thing. When we interrogate the distribution, what we mean is, did the first season of Squid Game uniformly sit in the top ten for around fifteen weeks in all countries where Netflix is available or were there just a few countries where it enjoyed a high degree of sustained popularity while it was only somewhat popular elsewhere?

The bar chart below is one approach to answering this question.

The most important aspect of the fun theme was enabled by the excellent, ‘Game of Squids’ font, made freely available for all purposes here. Many thanks to its creator.

The information it visualises, though, shows us that the greater number of countries for which data is available clustered around the average value. There were also notably more countries with values much higher than the average than there were countries with values much lower than the average. This give us some clues as to how the series remained in the global top ten for that much longer than its average (mean or modal) stay in the country-level top ten lists.

This visualisation, however, can only take us so far. Not only have we binned the data into categories of irregular length, we are not able to tell from this whether there is any spatial patterning to the popularity of Squid Game season one. In order to do so, we will need to visualise engagment with the series on a map.

Popularity by Country

The map below visualises the number of weeks the first seaons of Squid Game spent in the national top ten of the countries for which Netflix collected. You can mouse over the coloured areas to get a precise number of weeks and white areas indicate countries for which no data is available.

While clear areal trends are not obvious, we can see that Squid Game season one was especially popular in India, Pakistan, and Czechia. Perhaps surprisingly, given the amount of coverage its popularity generated, it was relatively less popular in the Anglosphere, rarely spending more time in the respective national top tens of these countries than average (i.e., mean number of weeks the series spent in the national top ten across all countries for which data is available). Nevertheless, it did appear to enjoy relatively global acclaim, only very rarely spending less than 10 weeks in a national top ten (e.g., in Ireland).

Conclusion

This report simply visualises the presence of Squid Game series one in Netflix’s national top ten lists. In so doing, mostly serves to reinforce what is already known: Squid Game was globally popular for an extended period of time. The geographic distribution of its popularity, though, is striking, especially its sustained popularity in India and Pakistan is striking. While K-Pop, K-Films, and K-Dramas all have their audiences in South Asia, the character of Ali in the series, played by Anupam Tripathi, represents a somewhat rare moment of South Asian representation in K-Wave media. For now, we wait to examine the popularity of later series in which the role is not reprised before drawing any firm conclusions about whether or not this was influential in the show’s reception.

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)