What were the most popular Chinese dramas among international viewers in the past 4 years? In the absence of box office figures or official viewership data, we turn to the world’s leading search engine to uncover trends outside of China.

First, let’s look at the results… *drum roll*

Top 10 Chinese Dramas (2019-2023) by Google Trend Search Interest (the score next to each title is its 10 Week Total Weekly Search Interest – see more on methodology below.)

1. Till the End of the Moon 长月烬明 (2023) – 567
2. Love Like the Galaxy 星汉灿烂 (2022) – 507
3. Hidden Love 偷偷藏不住 (2023) – 442
4. Three Lives, Three Worlds: The Pillow Book 三生三世枕上书 (2020) – 364
5. Immortal Samsara 沉香如屑 (2022) – 343
6. Only for Love 以爱为营 (2023) – 339
7. Love Between Fairy and Devil 苍兰诀 (2022) – 326
8. You Are My Glory 你是我的荣耀 (2021) – 301
9. Fireworks of My Heart 我的人间烟火 (2023) – 272
10. Lost You Forever 长相思 (2023) – 263

Here’s a longer list with more details, ranked by Peak Week instead:

Why Look at Google Trends?

Google Trends tracks search interest, which is a good indicator of general awareness and active interest in a TV show. If we can only look at one source, I believe Google Trends is the one because:

• It gives us the best representative picture of the world. Google is the search engine leader in almost all markets outside of China, except Korea (where it’s #2) and Russia
• Search queries are already categorized and grouped by TV show. This accounts for different translations and misspellings of titles and character names, which is often an issue with Chinese dramas.
• The downloadable dataset is accessible to all. This makes life easier for me, but also for anyone to replicate my findings. It results in more objective analysis and less data manipulation.

While Google Trends does not equate viewership, it is a good proxy for viewership because viewers and those intending to view are more likely to search, such as for where to watch or to read more. Of course, it’s possible for a drama to generate outsized interest just from promotion, critical reception, or controversy, but this is still meaningful to track as part of a drama’s cultural significance and impact.

It is possible to create a composite metric that takes into account viewership in various streaming platforms and social media activity, but this would introduce subjectivity into the rating. For now, I’d rather take Google Trends at face value and just focus on search interest.

How I did it: The Nitty Gritty on Ranking Methodology

Google Trends is a powerful tool that analyzes the popularity of search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. It allows users to compare 5 search terms at a time on a normalized index of weekly interest over 5 years max. According to Google, a value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.

Here’s what I did (and so can you):

I ran a large number of queries manually: Google Trends does not automatically generate a list of popular terms. I inputted Chinese dramas that had high domestic viewership according to Yunhe (云和) or high popularity on MyDramaList. I could have missed a below-the-radar drama altogether, but this is less likely the further up the rank you go.

I only looked at search results from Web. It is possible to look at YouTube Search separately, which is interesting because a lot of Chinese dramas are legally available to watch in full on YouTube, but this would also favor the shows that are uploaded to YouTube (vs primarily viewed in other platforms.)

I patched all the data together: In order to standardize the measurement of nearly 100 dramas, I compared every drama to Till the End of the Moon, the top performer in the past 5 years, such that its peak week is always at 100. In analyses where I look at older dramas, we do have a few with even higher search interest (most notably Yanxi Palace, the most Googled show on earth in 2018) with peak weeks above 100.

I then ranked dramas based on 2 measurements, Peak Week vs. 10 Week Period,

1. Peak Weekly Interest, comparing dramas based on their best week
2. Total Weekly Interest over 10 weeks, starting from the week the drama airs in China, comparing dramas based on total interest during its airing period. This largely aligns with the non-VIP airing period in China.

The two measurements largely correlate. I prefer the 10-week measurement as it packs in more information and rewards sustained interest more. It favors TV dramas with more episodes and longer airing periods, but again it think this is fair considering cultural impact over a longer period of time.

Finally, note that the Google Trends data is downloaded in Apr 2024. Google Trends does update its algorithm periodically, so it’s possible that the numbers have shifted slightly.