A date with Rain? I’d rather have my hair done

“Sorry, I’m washing my hair that night” is the familiar put-down you get when the girl of your dreams doesn’t fancy a date with you. But it’s also true of LKL visitors. They’re much more interested in finding the best Korean hairdressers in London, or reading about the techniques involved in a “Magic Straight” perm, than in perusing articles about the biggest male celebrity in Korea (and LKL Man of the Year 2006).

I’ve been trawling the site statistics for the second half of 2006, and here are some of the shock facts:

Lee Sabi continues to be the most popular Korean in the known universe (or at least on my site)
In the battle of the Samsung babes, Hyori is twice as popular as the Sassy Girl
A 400 year-old dead admiral is more popular than Lee Young-ae
Some of my readers have a nosey interest in celebrity sex scandals and celebrity plastic surgery and
An unpublished book is more popular than any published one

The graph below, showing visits resulting from people googling specific Korean celebs or bands, illustrates the first two points rather well. No further comment required. Though allow me slightly to redress the balance in the favour of the Sassy girl by showing Jeon Ji-hyun’s smooth thighs (themselves, strangely, a popular search term) below.

A 400 year-old dead admiral is more popular than Lee Young-ae?

You’ll have to take my word for it, but Admiral Yi Sun-sin generated 39 visits, 2 more than Lee Young-ae (though if you add the Dae Jang Geum visits as well, Lee is rescued from this humiliation. Whatever, I know which of the two I’d prefer a dinner date with).

Some of my readers are extremely interested in celebrity sex scandals and celebrity plastic surgery

I haven’t got comprehensive statistics on this (it took me long enough to scrub the data to its current state of polish), but celebrity tabloid gossip is of great interest to people. The graph above, for each celebrity X, includes search phrases such as “Celebrity X sex scandal” and “Celebrity X before and after plastic surgery photos”. I didn’t count these specifically, but probably around 30% of celebrity searches include these keywords. And in addition to the above celebrity-specific gossip-gatherers there were the general catch-alls such as “Korean Celebrity Plastic Surgery” (71 visits).

You should all be ashamed of yourselves¹.

An unpublished book is more popular than any published one

In my book category, my most searched-for book is the unpublished account by Andrew Holloway of his Year in Pyongyang. Go visit Aidan Foster-Carter’s website and read it.