Case Studies

Google's rate is a view-driven interaction rate, not a click-through rate; the other channels' CTR and CPC are on real link clicks.

Ad media by channel, each channel in the hue it keeps across every study. The figures are the Spend column of the table below.

Streams

2.67M Luminate to Sep 8 (2.06M stream equivalents, 411 song sales; 109,187 in the latest week). 20.74M all-DSP plays on FUGA: 81.9% YouTube Content ID (16.99M), 9.9% Spotify (2.05M), 4.6% Spotify under 30 seconds, 2.0% Shorts, 0.7% Apple Music. 2.20M Spotify streams on the activity feed (Sep 15). The feed logged 100K Spotify streams three days after release and 1M on Jul 27

Earned creator content

9.7M TikTok views across 1,575 creator videos, 788K engagements (8.13% rate). 2.05M Meta views across 8,111 creations on the top formats: Instagram Reels 867K views, Instagram posts 826K and 2,552 creations, Music Sticker 5,418 uses. Top creator territories: US, Mexico, Dominican Republic, India, Philippines, Brazil. 7 viral videos over 100K views logged

Playlists

125 placements (57 live): 89 Spotify, 20 Amazon Music, 11 YouTube, 3 TIDAL, 2 Apple Music. 25 editorial with 12.2M follower reach; 9 editorial still live; 52 listener-made; 8 artist-radio. 13.5M lifetime follower reach, 9.74M live. Named placements: K-Pop ON! (6.1M followers, peak 10, 79,174 plays), K-Pop Dance Party (1.2M, peak 2), K-Pop Rising (883K, peak 2), New Music Friday Philippines (773K, peak 21), K-Pop X-Overs (506K, number one), Stargirl vibes (471K, peak 13), New Music Friday AU and NZ (459K), All New K-Pop (360K, peak 2), New Music Friday Korea (peak 12), Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand

Charts

54 chart entries, 6 at number one, 14 in the top 10, 22 in the top 20: 33 on iTunes, 21 on Apple Music. Number one on iTunes Saudi Arabia (All Genres and Dance), Philippines Dance, Bahrain Dance and Türkiye Dance on release day, and Hong Kong Dance on Sep 6. Bahrain All Genres peak 2; Philippines All Genres and India Dance peak 4; Taiwan Dance 5; Colombia and Ireland Dance 6; Japan Dance 8; US Dance 19; India All Genres 98; Belgium All Genres 83

Radio and Shazam

220 radio plays across 35 stations, including Arirang Radio and Korean regional FM; 5,482 Shazams (3,000 by Jul 27)

Press

21 tracked articles. Agency placements: Genius feature "How K-Pop Rewrote The Rules For Global Collabs" (95.9M UVPM), Forbes interview with Jihyo (29.7M), Associated Press news item (28.3M), AllKpop

D2C

The Distant Lover Collectable Gift Box drove about $3.8K of the store's $4.0K gross merch sales and is the top product on the FANDOM store

Activity feed

367 logged events: 84 creator videos, 70 editorial playlist adds, 55 playlist adds, 54 chart entries, 37 radio plays, 6 new YouTube videos. Milestones: YouTube 2M views (Jul 19), 5M (Jul 23), 10M (Aug 16); TikTok 3M views (Aug 2); Instagram 750K views (Aug 13); 150 radio plays (Aug 25)

Artist-level lift

In launch week FANDOM entered Chartmetric's top 10K artists worldwide (Jul 11), top 5K (Jul 12), top 100 Korean artists (Jul 14), top 50 Korean hip-hop/rap (Jul 11) and top 50 East Asia hip-hop/rap (Jul 12); Spotify followers grew 8 to 10% a week through July; Bangkok Spotify listeners +231% in a month

Geography

Korea 28.4% and the Philippines 11.8% of FANDOM's TikTok viewers against the US at 11.1%; Apple Music and iTunes charts across Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, South and Southeast Asia and Hong Kong; Korean radio airplay

Blended CPM

$2.00 across all paid media (Google $1.29, Meta $2.26, TikTok $2.94; Marquee $20.56 by design)

Cost per paid video view

$0.0059 (benchmark $0.02 to $0.03); 56.3% view rate against a 15% bar

Cost per click

TikTok $0.052 on a 5.7% CTR; Meta $0.058 on a 3.9% CTR

Cost per Meta result

$0.054 blended; $177.69 per D2C purchase

Cost per converted Spotify listener

$0.78; $0.43 per new active listener; $3.43 per playlist add; $1.67 per save

Earned views per paid dollar

51 (all-in); $19.79 per 1,000 earned views; $121.86 per creator video (preliminary)

Cost per 1,000 Luminate streams

$52.35 on ad media; $71.81 all-in (preliminary, and 82% of consumption is Content ID rather than DSP streams)

Cost per earned YouTube subscriber

$7.10 (Google-attributed, 5,498 subscribers)

Creator seeding

$5.74 blended CPM; $0.0057 per view; $198 per post; 7.7% blended engagement across four vendors

Direct-to-fan

$0.08 per click across two Laylo sends

• Three cost problems compounded.

  Launch-window CPMs ($1.29 Google, $2.94 TikTok), a 2.40x Meta frequency on the main traffic flight, and a 29% invalid-interaction rate on one Google search campaign. None was fatal alone. Together they set the release's cost base, and I can now name all three before the next launch.

• Launch-window inventory is expensive.

  Front-loading was right, but July's $2.51 and August's $3.69 Google CPMs were two to three times the cheapest month of the year, and the buy needed tighter targeting to pay for it.

• A stream is not one unit.

  82% of this record's consumption is YouTube Content ID: people watching creator videos that contain the song. I read cost per stream alongside the DSP mix, and I report Content ID plays separately from Spotify streams.

• The casting thesis is proven.

  Korea and the Philippines are 40% of the audience. The next release gets an APAC-first geo plan, and I have the chart, radio and viewer data to back it.

• D2C needs its own discipline.

  $177.69 per purchase on the conversion campaign, while the box set itself carried the store. Product and creative were right; the audience and bid setup were not, and that is the first thing I will fix.

• Marquee bought the right listeners.

  46,852 new active listeners at $0.43 each and 5,827 playlist adds, on $20K. Marquee is also the only place a DSP-side conversion can be measured at all.

• Editorial is still live, so the story is not finished.

  57 live placements and 9.74M of live follower reach, 9 of them editorial. Whether that converts into streams before the placements lapse is the number to re-read in 60 days.