As most of us know, Le Sserafim debuted in May last year to considerable fanfare. As Source Music's follow-up to GFriend, they piqued my interest somewhat, so shortly after their debut, I started a long-term project to track their individual fancam views as a way to gauge the popularity of each member.
My methodology was to search for official fancams on YouTube, then record the views for each member roughly a week after a particular fancam was uploaded. Now we have to keep in mind that fancam views can vary drastically depending on source (e.g. M Countdown tends to have more views than Show Champion), so in order to normalise views across sources, I calculated the average (mean) views for each set of fancams, then expressed each LSF member's performance *as a percentage* of that number.
It was then simple to generate a time-phased presentation of the data, with each member's percentages for each set of fancams colour-coded in a green-yellow-red scale (with green being best). My results are shown in the figure below:
Observations and questions:
- First of all, the various music shows are quite inconsistent in posting complete sets of fancams, so as we can see, it's often the case that fancams are missing for certain members.
- As shown in the last row, I calculated the median value of the percentage scores for each member, and based on that, Le Sserafim's overall popularity ranking is as follows: Sakura, Kazuha, Chaewon, Eunchae, Yunjin.
- The first thing to notice here is that Sakura easily dominates across all three of LSF's eras (Fearless - Antifragile - Unforgiven). What's the reason for this? Is it just because of her fandom from the HKT48/AKB48 days?
- Now my biggest question is: what happened to Kazuha? Her start was even stronger than Sakura's, I'm assuming because she has the best visuals in the group. However, her fancam views already started declining during Fearless promotions, and her performance during the Antifragile time frame was uneven. Things got even worse during the Unforgiven era, with Kazuha's fancams often receiving among the lowest views. So what happened? Her visuals haven't gotten worse from what I've seen, so something else must be the culprit.
- Chaewon, on the other hand, had a middle-of-the-pack start. However, towards the end of Antifragile promotions, she began gaining more and more views. What was the cause? Conversely, why wasn't Chaewon able to maintain her popularity during Unforgiven? Her performance during this era has been very inconsistent, and like Kazuha, she's been falling behind her fellow members.
- Eunchae, meanwhile, had a pretty horrible start, ranking the worst or second-worst consistently during Fearless. That being said, her views increased quite a bit during Antifragile promotions, and she's continued to improve through Unforgiven, even taking first place at times. Was it Garam's departure that benefited her? Or are her increased views just due to her upgraded visuals?
- Like Eunchae, Yunjin also had a bad start. Did people not like her because she's from the US? Were her visuals too "Western"? She really didn't show much improvement until Unforgiven promotions, so again, is there a reason for this?
- As for Garam, she had a middle-of-the-pack start like Chaewon. Now hypothetically, if she hadn't been kicked out of the group, where do you think she would rank currently?
- Taking a step back, are fancam views even an accurate measure of individual member popularity? I tend to believe that they're a relatively valid indicator.
