At last, we come to the end of a run of busy months and have the chance to take a deeper dive on something. Specifically, we return to the secondary analysis of survey data to explore differences in habits pertaining to the consumption of K-Wave media as well as Korea language education, a particular personal interest. Even more specifically, we look at the most recent Korea Foundation (KF) survey on the state of the K-Wave with regard to the amount of time and money respondents report spending on K-Pop, K-Dramas, Korean variety shows, and Korean language education.
We have looked at the KF surveys on the state of the K-Wave before. We now turn to the latest iteration of the survey, which is dated 2025, but was in fact carried out in November 2024. The scale of the survey continued to grow; most recently, it was delivered to 26,400 people over 28 countries, with the samples in each country stratified and sized to reflect their respective population. While questions about K-Pop, K-Dramas, and variety shows have long been included in the survey, this mos recent iteration incorporated questions on engagement with the Korean language and Korean language study for the first time.
The survey is vast, but the subset of it to which we restrict ourselves is very manageable, drawn from respondents in each country with “experience of the relevant content”. The following visualisation presents the 28 surveyed countries in rank order by number of hours spent on watching K-Dramas and variety shows. The phrasing used when describing the consumption of K-Pop is viewing hours, too, and I have so far not been able to determine whether this is just a matter of consistent formatting or whether it also includes time spent listening to the music with no visual component. For language study, no distinction is made between formal, semi-formal, and informal learning.
To make it easier to compare the activities across countries, the graphs in the visualisations are linked. If you mouse over one of the bars, it should be highlighted in pink and the corresponding bar for that country should also get highlighted in the other graphs.
Some general patterns are clearly discernible from the foregoing. People in the Philippines spend a particularly large amount of time on Korean media and the study of the Korean language whereas Japanese respondents report spending much less time on it. More precisely, they reported spending a third of the time on Korean language study and a sixth of the time of K-Pop compared to respondents from the Philippines.
Impressionistically, there seems to be a general tendency for countries to be ranked consistently across all these categories. Where people spend a a lot of time watching K-Dramas, they also spend a lot of time studying the language. Where very little time is spent on K-Pop, commensurately little time is spent on Korean variety shows, and so on. It must be conceded, though, that individual exceptions can be found, such as Taiwan and Indonesia’s relatively high consumption across all three forms of media, but relatively small amount of time devoted to language study, or the less extreme inverse of that situation for the USA.
As well as the average monthly time spent on these categories of K-Wave cultural product, respondents also estimated the amount of money they spent on them each month. The average values for this were reported by country in the report in USD. This is visualised below.
The ranking of countries in terms of money spent on the K-Wave is strikingly different from the ranking of countries in terms of time spent. For those with experience of the relevant aspect of the Korean Wave, those resident in Saudi Arabia and the UAE report spending the largest USD amount. Only in the category of Korean language study are these countries outspent, but even then by just two countries: China and Hong Kong. Other high-spending countries include the UK, the USA, and Australia. Once more, this impressionistically holds across categories and those countries which spend more on, for example, Korean Dramas tend to appear towards the top of the rankings on K-Pop spending, while those which spend less appear nearer the bottom.
There does not seem to be a strong relationship between the amount of time and money spent on K-Wave media. Notably, respondents from the Philippines report spending only USD 5.90 per month on Korean Dramas (the sixth lowest amount among surveyed countries) despite reporting spending considerably more time on it than even the second ranked country. Similarly, despite topping the table for hours spent on Korean language study, South African respondents reported spending the fourth lowest amount on it among surveyed countries. There are also countries where consuming even a relatively small amount of K-Wave content appears to be costly for individuals. Respondents in the USA reported watching Korean drama for, on average, less than a third of the time respondents from the Philippines did. Their monthly spend on it in USD, though, was more than three times greater, representing the third largest amount reported among the countries surveyed.
The foregoing paints a very particular picture of the Korean Wave in the world. K-Wave content is consumed widely across all of the surveyed countries, but notably more in Southeast Asia than other regions. It is, however, in the richer nations of the Middle East, Anglosphere, and Western Europe where individuals who engage with the relevant aspect of the Korean Wave report devoting the largest amount of money to it. There is, however, a twist which could lead us to question to accuracy of this picture.
The survey itself is large and rigorous. The results it reports are not in doubt. For the specific figures reported here, however, the average for each country is not calculated across the whole sample, but rather for a subset of those who identify as “people with experience of the relevant (cultural) content” (해당 콘텐츠 경험자). While experience with at least one aspect of the K-Wave was a pre-requisite for participation in the survey (as outlined in its ‘Summary Report’ (2025 해외한류실태조사 요약편, p.22), the proportion of the population with experience of a particular category of cultural content varied considerably both within and between countries. For some categories, especially language study, sometimes only a relatively small proportion of the sample reported having experience with the relevant category.
The variation in sample sizes raises the question of how accurately the figures we report here represent engagement with the K-Wave in a more general sense rather than just for people specifically engaged with the relevant content. For example, in South Africa 189 people of a total sample of 800 reported studying Korean, and among them the average amount of time devoted to it was 41 hours 24 minutes per month. Conversely, in Vietnam a smaller average duration of monthly Korean language study was reported (27 hours 42 minutes) but by 322 of the total sample of 900. That is, over a third of respondents in Vietnam, but under a quarter in South Africa reported studying Korean. As well as being a larger proportion of the samples, this represents a larger raw number of individuals (322 > 189) and aggregated number study hours (8919 hours 24 minutes > 7824 hours 36 minutes). What’s more, when weighted by proportion of the total sample (proportion of sample multiplied by the average number of study hours) the pattern of engagement with the Korean language is reversed, too. This weighting is key for understanding the actual levels of engagement with the Korean Wave across countries, especially economically. A country in which a small number of individuals spend heavily on K-Pop, for example, may represent a less favourable market than one in which a large number of people spend a smaller amount on it. While there are likely to be some developments that will require timely treatment over the next couple of months, we will investigate this further in the near future.
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)