2022 Analysis of Global Hallyu Status

By the World Association for Hallyu Studies

I. Overall

1. Overview of Investigation

The year 2022 was a year in which Hallyu made further advances in the world. The development of transnational over-the-top media services (hereinafter referred to as OTT), including Netflix, has made it easy for people around the world to access not only their own culture but also that of a society on the other side of the globe. Following this trend, in 2022, Netflix original series Squid Game achieved the feat of winning the first Emmy Award for a non-English-language TV series. The continued popularity of BTS (Bangtan Boys) and BLACKPINK, as well as the box office and television hits Parasite and Squid Game, respectively, suggest that Hallyu content has overcome the great obstacle of the language barrier and has begun to exert a significant influence on the world.

Since 2012, the Korea Foundation (KF) has been publishing an annual “Analysis of Global Hallyu Status” to capture the present state of the Korean Wave in the world. Specifically, in cooperation with overseas diplomatic offices, it determines the size, distribution, and trends of Hallyu around the world to use it as basic data for relevant academic research or strategy building. “2022 Analysis of Global Hallyu Status” investigated the current status and activities of Hallyu communities and community members by collecting data from a total of 109 countries for three months from November 2022 (the specific survey items are shown in Table 1). Unlike other literature dealing with the status of Hallyu1, this survey has the

Category Contents

Country overview country name, population, area, religion, time difference from Korea, official language(s), GDP per capita, trade with Korea

Hallyu status General information overall status of Hallyu in the country

Method of Collection

CIA The World Factbook, IMF, official data published by Korea International Trade Association, etc.

Hallyu community status

Status by field broadcasting (drama, entertainment, OTT), film, K-pop, Korean food, Korean language, K-beauty (makeup, fashion, style, etc.), K-sports, E-content (gaming, webtoon), other industries

Preference factor

General information what locals love about Korean culture overall characteristics and trend of Hallyu communities in the country

By community community name, online/offline classification, characteristics, number of members, website, active status qualitative description based on field survey conducted by diplomatic missions abroad summary description based on field survey conducted by diplomatic missions abroad quantitative description based on field survey conducted by diplomatic missions abroad distinctive feature of being a “person-centered” research that analyzes the fandom that enjoys Korean content, not the content itself.

The “Analysis of Global Hallyu Status” has been published for more than ten years from 2012 to the present, and has accumulated a vast amount of data, but the ways in which data is provided to the public have been limited to paper books and PDFs. To overcome this, the KF in 2021 established a new KF Statistics Center and has been making efforts to deliver various visual materials and statistical data directly to researchers. The survey method and criteria of “Analysis of Global Hallyu Status,” which have been changed since 2021, are as follows.

First, as for the criterion for selecting targets to investigate the current status of Hallyu community activities, the objects of the survey were specified as online Hallyu-related communities that opened and operated web pages and Hallyu-related communities that were actually active offline. Communities that exist in name only and have no actual activities were excluded from the survey. For example, even if a community exists online or offline, if there were no actual activities during the year 2022, that group is excluded from the investigation. In addition, communities that sell products such as goods related to Hallyu were regarded as Hallyu-related communities in that they deal with products targeting Hallyu fans. On the other hand, communities that sell Korean cosmetics were not included in Hallyu-related communities in that they are not only used by Hallyu fans but also by the general public. A community started by an organization or individual was considered a Hallyu community if it dealt with Hallyu content or learning Korean, because it was expected that communication and exchange among Hallyu fans would be the main focus.

Second, if a single community operates multiple channels on social networking platforms, it is regarded as one community and only the channel with the largest number of members is set as the object of investigation.2 Until 2020, when a single community opened and operated multiple channels, they were counted as multiple communities, but from 2021 onward, only the channels with the most users were included in the survey, in order to improve its accuracy. This is in consideration of the fact that community members are highly likely to engage in overlapping activities across multiple platforms operated by one community, and is part of an effort to prevent overestimation of the number of members. However, this method has limitations in that it excludes the sociodemographic distribution of different users for each platform.3 Nevertheless, the survey after 2021 focused on resolving the problems of overestimation rather than underestimation, which has the advantage of enabling more conservative and stable predictions in establishing Hallyu-related projects or policies in the future.

Third, by classifying the nature of communities according to major activities or interests, the reality that the area of interest of Hallyu fandom is diversifying can be reflected. Communities are classified into music, drama, entertainment shows, tourism, food, Korean language, beauty, literature, e-sports (gaming), traditional culture, webtoon, Taekwondo, animation, and general Hallyu, and this classification system, introduced in 2021, reflects the phenomenon that interest in Hallyu content extends beyond a few specific areas into various fields. As data accumulates in the future, it is expected that it will be possible to dynamically track even the characteristic changing patterns of communities.

Despite these improvements, the survey data of “Analysis of Global Hallyu Status” have the following limitations:

First, as different personnel in each diplomatic mission investigate the current status of communities, there may be different criteria for classifying characteristics or constructing qualitative data. Nevertheless, the collection of data by diplomatic missions helps to understand and interpret more accurately the different social and cultural backgrounds of each country and region, which, in turn, aids in understanding the characteristics and activities of Hallyu communities in each country. In addition, any differences due to the qualitative deviation from the mean by the person in charge of the survey in one locality can be mitigated through repeated iterations of the investigation.

Second, if one fan joins and participates in multiple Hallyu communities, that person cannot be accurately counted. This is a limitation that occurs because the unit of analysis of the survey is not an individual but a group called a Hallyu community. It is difficult to completely resolve this limitation unless the survey method is changed to a survey of individual Hallyu community members. However, it is unrealistic to try to grasp the size of Hallyu community activities through individual surveys, and there is also the problem of representing the communities as individuals. Considering this, the current survey method is meaningful in that it enables efficient estimation of the size of Hallyu fandom at a macro level.

Third, due to the nature of the research design, it is difficult to quantify the current status of Hallyu community activities when these are sporadic and intermittent or there is no online activity. Quantitative

2) The standard for counting the number of members by social networking platforms is “followers” for Twitter and Instagram, “subscribers” for YouTube, and “members” for other channels. In the case of Facebook, it was based on the larger number of among “likes” and “followers.” data collection is also impossible if emergences such as disasters or wars occur during the survey period. For this reason, only a total of 109 countries, excluding 11 out of a total of 118 surveyed countries, were finally included in the analysis.

3) For example, Facebook is more likely to be used by older people than Instagram.

Even considering the limitations mentioned above, the “Analysis of Global Hallyu Status” provides a vast amount of information that can broadly identify and verify the size, distribution, and trends of Hallyu communities around the world, differentiating from other Hallyu-related analyses that focus on content. This research is therefore meaningful in that it facilitates future Hallyu-related academic research or strategy-building.

2. Analysis

“2022 Analysis of Global Hallyu Status” analyzed the current status of communities in 109 out of 120 countries surveyed, excluding 11 where quantitative information on Hallyu communities was not provided. By region, 23 countries in Asia, 21 in the Americas, 35 in Europe, and 30 in Africa and the Middle East were analyzed.

Table 2 is the result of a survey on the current status of Hallyu communities around the world from 2012 to 2022. Looking at the number of Hallyu communities, we can see that the number of communities increased by 220 in 2022 alone, a 15.0% growth rate, indicating that the previous decrease since 2019 had rebounded. This rebound is encouraging, considering that the size of Hallyu fandom was conservatively estimated by counting only one platform rather than all platforms that overlap as one community, due to the new survey criteria that changed from 2021. Of the 1,684 communities reported in 2022, 1,131 or 67.2% are geared toward music, and 256 or 15.2% are active throughout various Hallyu content types. It is presumed that many of them are also interested in K-pop. This means that more than half of the fan base driving the Hallyu craze are K-pop fans.

Meanwhile, the number of community members increased by 22.2 million or 14.2% from the previous year to about 179 million people in 2022. This is a rate that is very similar to the growth rate of the number of communities, namely 15.0%. While the previous trend in Hallyu fandom showed a type of growth in which the number of communities decreased while the number of community members increased, in 2022, the number of community members naturally increased as the types of community content diversified and the number of communities by content type increased.

Although it is not possible to precisely specify the cause of such a change, the factors can be largely summarized into two types. First, it can be interpreted in terms of the activation of online communities due to COVID-19 and the activation of offline communities due to the implementation of the Living with COVID-19 policy.4 When people were forced to be socially active online due to COVID-19, most fandom activities followed suit. A characteristic of online communities is that they are independent of physical space, which allows a large number of people to form a community over long distances. The characteristics of these online communities can also be confirmed in that the aggregation of existing community members coincides with the spread of the pandemic. On the other hand, offline communities are relatively bound by the physical environment. As many people cannot be active together in physical space at the same time, unlike the case with online communities, it is not easy to bring people together from distant areas into a single community. At the point of global transition to Living with COVID-19, the revival of existing offline communities and the emergence of new ones became possible. The increase of the number of communities in direct proportion to the number of community members in 2022 seems to reflect this.

Second, as the types of Hallyu content diversified, the nature of communities did also. In addition, the emergence of artists forming new fan bases in various genres such as K-pop, K-drama, and Korean movies seems to have driven the growth of the number of communities and members. For example, if existing K-pop fandom was centered on communities focusing on specific groups such as BTS or BLACKPINK, new communities were formed around up-and-coming singers in addition to the creation of communities devoted to each individual member of BTS, following rumors of the group’s disbanding.

Based on these two possibilities, if there is a keyword that can characterize the current status of Hallyu communities in 2022, it would be “diversification” based on internal and external expansion.

Figures 1 and 2 show at a glance the number of communities and community members by region from 2012 to 2022. The number of communities by continent increased by 139 or 37.6% in Europe, 35 or 25.0% in Africa and the Middle East, and 69 or 13.1% in Asia compared to the previous year, while the number in the Americas fell by 23, a drop of 5.4%. Yet, the number of community members by continent showed a growth trend in all regions. Europe increased by about 3.5 million members (37.1%), Africa and the Middle East by around 560,000 (24.1%), Asia by roughly 15 million (13.4%), and the Americas by approximately 2.6 million (9.0%). In other words, figure for both communities and community members grew in all regions except in the Americas, where the number of communities decreased.

The Asian region, geographically close to Korea and relatively less culturally distant from Korean culture, played a role as a bridgehead for spreading the early Hallyu craze around the world, and is also the region where the majority of Hallyu fans around the world live. However, the scale of activities of Hallyu communities in some countries is seen as decreasing, which may indicate cultural differences between countries. For example, in Japan, there is a culture that prefers a global fan community platform that allows direct communication with Hallyu celebrities rather than small communities where only members of the same group can communicate. Specifically, numbers of fans fell in Taiwan by 560,000 from about 2.2 million in 2021 to 1.6 million in 2022, a drop of 25.4%, and in Japan by 72,000 from about 340,000 to 270,000, a 20.8% decrease. In addition, although the number of community members decreased in Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, and China, it increased in other regions, including India (12.0%), Mongolia (41.4%), and Vietnam (223.0%), showing an overall increase across Asia.

The Americas have the largest Hallyu fan base outside Asia, and are expected to become a major consumer of Korean culture in the future. In 2022, the number of community members in the Americas increased by 9.0% from about 29 million to 31 million, while the number of communities decreased from 427 to 404. Unlike other regions, the increase in the number of community members is not proportional to the increase in the number of communities, so research on the unique characteristics of American Hallyu fandom is required.

Specifically, Canada was the country that had the greatest influence on the increase in the number of Hallyu community members, which increased by about 3 million from roughly 2 million in 2021 to 5 million in 2022, a growth of 154.0%. This is a considerable size even when compared to the increase of about 2.6 million in the Americas as a whole, and the growth of Hallyu communities in Canada offset the decline in other countries in the Americas. In doing so, Canada has emerged as a new center of Hallyu, recording the highest rate of increase in the number of community members in the Americas for two consecutive years, and is expected to play an important role henceforth in influencing the future of Hallyu culture. On the other hand, in the United States, the number of community members decreased by 450,000 from 16.7 million to 16.2 million, a fall of 2.7%. Other countries with an increase in the number of community members are Argentina (18.6%) and Colombia (179.1%), which serve as strongholds for the spread of Hallyu in South America. In addition, fan numbers fell by about 540,000 people (37.8%) in Brazil and about 140,000 people (11.3%) in Peru, so it is necessary to keep an eye on future trends.

Meanwhile, in 2022, the region with the largest increase in the number of Hallyu fans is Europe. European Hallyu fandom grew by about 37.1%, growing by 3.5 million from about 9.6 million in 2021 to about 13.2 million in 2022. This is led by Russia, where numbers rose by 2.2 million (39.0%), and Turkey, which saw an increase of 1.3 million (129.2%). In contrast, numbers declined by 460,000 (84.1%) in Kazakhstan and about 150,000 (25.9%) in France.

Lastly, Africa and the Middle East are regions with the fewest Hallyu fans in the world, and also with the most countries where Hallyu-related research is difficult. Growth trends in both the number of communities and members were observed, recording an increase of 35 communities and about 560,000 community members, 25.0% and 24.1% respectively. However, apart from the high rate of increase, the absolute size itself did not increase significantly because the size of the existing Hallyu fandom was small. However, the steady increase in communities shows that the acceptance of Hallyu culture is increasing in Africa and the Middle East, giving a positive outlook for the spread of Hallyu in these regions.