Explaining The Official Ranking Of The Most Popular K-pop Idols Worldwide 2021

Good day to you dear readers, a couple of days ago I stated we would work to expatiate more about our recent ranking of “The Most Popular K-pop Idols Worldwide 2021“, meaning we will provide and explain some of the metrics we used in making our official ranking due to the controversies surrounding the publication. Allegations were insinuating this platform is a fan site for a particular character or that our publication is not based on any study, we hope to debunk that in this article.

First of all, I would like to announce that Nubia Magazine is a multicultural international publication established to focus on global culture as a whole. We make publications on various topics and interests across the globe.

Weeks ago, some members of our global committee for K-pop asked that we make a publication on the most popular K-pop Idols Worldwide, we did our research and we noticed this particular topic is of interest to many people based on web searches. I and our editorial team agreed to make a proper study on the subject matter and share the list with the world, which we did.

Below we will explain a little bit more on how we made our final judgement of this recent ranking. I must say though, many members of our community believe this is unnecessary because even the most popular media platforms do not share metrics even on their most controversial publications, but for future reference, we have decided to clear this issue once and for all.

There were ten personalities featured on the list, but the two major figures that influenced the controversy surrounding the publication are the music artists known as Kim Taehyung and Jeon Jungkook, ranked first and second respectively.

We will be focusing on these two to explain how we did our study on each personality featured on the list.

Our publication title reads: “The Most Popular K-pop Idols Worldwide 2021”

What is the definition of Popular?

You can see from the image, above a definition from the Oxford dictionary.

Meaning we didn’t use ‘fame’ or trends only but other factors like; the personalities global reach, ‘likeness’ and fan dedication’, how much fans love and adore these personalities on a global scale in recent times, with the period in review majorly focused on the last 6 months and partially on the last 12 months.

When it came to the top two, it was surely a close call, but we could make a definite final decision based on the factors we used.

Points to note:

At the beginning of our study, we quickly noticed the personality popularly known as ‘V’ is often searched and referenced by different names on the Internet which made tracking the footprint a little complicated, but we did our best to analyse and finalise, we noticed names like “Taehyung” “V” and “Kim Taehyung”  (his full name) we also noted the official stage name for the music artist is “V” but many use the unofficial stage name (“Taehyung”) to reference him or search for him instead. It was also noted during the course of our study that his original names are sometimes misspelt and maybe a little too complex for some people to note, we considered all these.

The second personality popularly known as Jungkook (his official and popularly known stage name), was noted he is often generally and officially referenced by these two major names “Jeon Jungkook” and “Jungkook” on the internet.

So let’s get to it then:

Instagram

Instagram is one of the major platforms we used to study activities relating to the personalities on our list since it is such a global platform.

We noticed the BTS members do not have official accounts on social media so we decided to check for fan accounts followers stats and engagement, we also used the hashtags for full name and popularly known stage names which the personalities are often referenced on social networks. There were too many accounts so we focused only on fan accounts with over a million followers, we took note of them and also decided to study these accounts for weeks. You will find some screenshots we took for more clarity below. Please take note the numbers you see on the screen may have increased since we did our original study which we concluded over a week ago.

V on Instagram

Study the screenshots

 

 

 

Over 27 million followers noted

Over 120 million hashtags noted (#V #Taehyung #Kimtaehyung)

Jungkook On Instagram

Over 23 million followers noted.

Over 90 million hashtags noted & studied. (#Jungkook and #JeonJungkook)

Please note: this study was not made to declare which personalities on our list have the most Instagram stats, as we did not study every single fan account for both, we only made studies on major accounts and tags to be used with other factors for the ranking.

FACEBOOK

Since actual hashtags numbers can’t be calculated for Facebook we focused on fan groups and page follows that are over 500k

Jungkook On Facebook

 

Jungkook FB: Over 11 million follows noted and studied

3 Fan Groups above 500k noted and studied

V on Facebook

V on FB: Over 7 million follows noted and studied

1 fan group above 500k noted and studied

Please note this study was not conducted to declare which personalities on our list have more Facebook stats as we did not study every single page and groups for the idols on our list, we noted them to be studied and used alongside a variety of other factors.

TWITTER

For Twitter, since total hashtags can’t be calculated like Instagram or Tiktok we noted and focused on fan accounts with over 500k followers and also noted and studied regional diversities of some fan accounts, e.g countries with little or no K-pop popularity compared to the rest of the world E.G AFRICA

Jungkook On Twitter

Jungkook twitter: 2 Major accounts with over 500k followers and noted and studied

(Combined followers: 2.9 million)

V on Twitter

 

V Twitter: 5 major accounts with over 500k followers noted and studied (6million combined followers)

This study was not made to declare which personalities on our list have more Twitter stats, as we did not study every single fan account for all the idols, we noted them to be studied and used alongside a variety of factors.

 

TIKTOK

We studied and noted hashtag views of full names and stage names for the personalities on our list on Tiktok.

Jungkook On Tiktok

 

 

Jungkook Tiktok: Over 60 billion hashtag views noted and studied (#JeonJungkook and #Jungkook)

V on Tiktok

 

V Tiktok: Over 80 billion hashtag views noted and studied (#V #Taehyung #Kimtaehyung)

This study was not made to declare which personalities on our list have more TikTok stats, as we only studied the major official hashtags, we noted them to be studied and used alongside a variety of factors.

YOUTUBE

For youtube, we decided to focus on the most viewed solo videos relating to their music with more focus on ‘MVs’ and other popular videos like Lyrics videos. We studied these videos looking at factors like engagement (comments), likes, most recent views, we used tools like Social Blade at some point to further clarify the analysis.

Jungkook On Youtube

 

V on Youtube

 

 

Please take note: This study was not made to declare which personalities on our list have more Youtube stats, we noted them to be studied and used alongside a variety of factors.

 

We studied the recent engagements of fans on the hashtags and accounts across the platforms we mentioned above for better clarity.

 

EXPLORING THE WORLD WIDE WEB AND MORE SOCIAL NETWORKS:

To further expand our study on the web globally, we decided to explore more local social communities across the globe, blogs, news websites. To do this we used some amazing web analytics tools like Awario and Mediatoolkit

 

We used some of these tools to track down mentions of the idols on our list from different social communities in different regions across the globe, we tracked the mentions of the idols to be featured for days, dating them between 6-12 months ago, we noted and studied reach and engagements from over 70 social platforms from different countries and regions where we tracked mentions of the names of the idols, looking at comments, likes and positive sentiments from the fans. One of the interesting ones was when we discovered mentions of both Jungkook and V mentions from Africa’s largest web forum, a website called Nairaland. We explored several major social communities from different countries which were studied for weeks.

We reached out to different committee members on our mailing list to please take an offline survey about the most popular K-Pop stars in their regions mostly (The Americas, Europe & Africa), many of them gave feedbacks mentioning most BTS members and Blackpink members, most of which are Jungkook, V, Jimin and Lisa as the most known names and faces, some feedbacks did mention there was more attention on Jungkook and ‘V’ more than the rest.

 

GOOGLE TRENDS

We used the google trends official analysis tool to see which idols on our list had the most searches in the last 6 months which was dated December, 1st 2020 to 31st of May 2021, so we studied the charts. When it came to Google searches we noticed google trends had combined searches for “Taehyung”, “Kim Taehyung” under the title V (singer)

And for Jungkook we noticed Google trends had combined the searches for “Jeon Jungkook” and “Jungkook” under the official stage name Jungkook (singer), so there was no reason to search the names separately.

Data from google trends in the last 6 months: Jungkook and V have an equal percentage of searches worldwide

From the image above V = Blue Jungkook = Red

Please take note: This study was not made to declare which personalities on our list have more Google searches in 2021, we only noted them to be studied and used alongside a variety of factors in our ranking…

 

WHEN IT CAME TO AN END, LOOKING AT THE EXTENSIVE STUDY WE MADE, I AND THE REST OF OUR EDITORIAL TEAM WERE ABLE TO EASILY RANK 10 OUT OF OVER 20 K-POP IDOLS WE STUDIED.

Please Note: This article was not made to be a Jungkook Vs V comparison, as we do respect and admire the two amazing personalities contributing so much positivity to our world. We only used this as an explanation for metrics and how we made our studies and factors that resulted in the final ranking. All thanks to our editorial team and committee members around the world who contributed to the publication.

 

In the meantime: YOU CAN APPLY TO JOIN OUR GLOBAL COMMITTEE HERE

 

Thank You For Your Time…

Gideon. (Lead Editor)