I read a few posts lately about which Kpop girl groups are the most popular ones these days and it got me curious. I've been a Kpop fan for a long time so I can hazard a decent guess at the rankings, but I wanted something a little more concrete for an answer. Being the nerd that I am, I pulled up some data and started crunching the numbers. Here's what I found.
The popularity contest
For Twicehub's currently active girl groups (sans GIRLSET), one might easily deduce that TWICE are probably among the most popular, and that SAY MY NAME are among the least popular. That expectation was clearly met after combining sources of information such as social media traction, album sales, and streaming numbers. However, the interesting thing was how close many of the other groups were to each other:
As you can see in Figure 1, aespa, NewJeans, and ITZY follow after TWICE in that order, but their numbers are so similar to each other that different sources or analyses of the data could easily place them in an alternate ranking. For NewJeans's part, they've been hard hit by the ongoing mess with ADOR and HYBE, and were it not for that they might have had a clear lead over aespa and ITZY, putting them in a solid second behind TWICE (or even first?).
The real shocker for me though was finding that IVE and LE SSERAFIM were in the middle of the pack. I anticipated that IVE might come in third place after TWICE and NewJeans, but they landed in fifth, partly due to ITZY simply being around longer, which gave the JYPE group an edge against Starship's in the overall data. If ITZY and IVE debuted around the same time then IVE could probably come out ahead (see the next section). LE SSERAFIM fell into sixth place due to similar reasoning.
NMIXX in seventh place is sadly unsurprising to me. I love alot of their songs and find them to be among the best released in recent years, but dropping interesting music doesn't necessarily translate to popularity (RIP Billlie).
Rounding out the top ten are Kep1er, NiziU, and SAY MY NAME. Kep1er never gained the popularity that their predecessor IZ*ONE had, and NiziU struggles outside of Japan which greatly reduces their impact on the data. SAY MY NAME? Yeah they're new so their numbers are expected to be lower in general, however they're in pretty bad shape overall despite their newness.
What if the groups debuted simultaneously?
Obviously the main problem with a popularity contest like the above is the fact that each group debuted at different times. By normalizing their data based on the amount of time each group has been active, one can get a fairer determination of each group's present-day popularity, aka their momentum:
Figure 2 shows the momentum of every group, where a higher momentum suggests that they have better long term prospects (in terms of popularity) than groups with less momentum.
The more recently debuted, but still popular, groups of LE SSERAFIM, IVE, NewJeans, and aespa are all clearly outstripping the other 4th and 5th generation groups. Both LE SSERAFIM and IVE ended up being favored largely because of their strengths in concert touring, but NewJeans could've potentially been in front of the pack had they not fallen off due to their aforementioned hiatus. aespa is strong overall but their older age and weaker touring numbers end up putting them behind their peers.
While TWICE dominates in raw statistics, the group came in fifth instead of out front this time due their significantly older age than the rest. This means that the newer groups ahead of them were able to reach milestones much quicker than TWICE, probably due to Kpop's global growth.
Coming in sixth and seventh are ITZY and NMIXX, with the pair being close in value to each other, but significantly distant from their sunbaes. ITZY's social media and touring scores are good but they struggle with album sales and streaming compared to the pack leaders. NMIXX are worse off than ITZY by every measure, however their momentum is buoyed by the group's much younger age.
As with the popularity chart, NiziU, Kep1er, and SAY MY NAME also lag behind in momentum. NiziU for their part blew up before debut but trailed off with time, so their ranking could've been significantly higher in years past. Unfortunately for both Kep1er and SAY MY NAME, neither group had a strong period like NiziU and as such have thus far struggled through their careers, resulting in them rounding out the bottom.
Conclusion
It was interesting to see how the rankings compared to my initial guess. I had assumed that TWICE would do well in popularity given their tour numbers even if they're not the most hype group at the moment. However, I didn't expect LE SSERAFIM to be doing so well in momentum. For sure I thought it might've been a toss up between aespa and IVE, but it seems that Sakura and Chaewon's group slipped right past me.
In a follow up article, I'll show a model that predicts what the popularity rankings may look like in the future.