Weverse Company has issued “2025 Fandom Trend Report.” From 2019 to 2025, the platform shows explosive growth and continual diversification.
The global fan platform has become more than just a direct artist-fan community interaction application in the K-pop industry. It’s turning fandom into a repeatable growth funnel, then monetizing the deepest layers, especially superfans.
Today, it operates more like a bundled fandom economy that consists of community, live video, and shopping under one roof. In 2025, engagement stages, listening parties, and digital merch became the core signal of the platform.
Weverse’s 2025 Fandom Trend Report: How a Fan App Turned Casual Fans Into Superfans
HYBE (formerly Big Hit Entertainment) launched Weverse in June 2019. Originally created for artists under Big Hit Entertainment, the platform aimed to centralize fan engagement.
Weverse started with just BTS and TXT communities and a mainly K-pop fanbase. The app’s first design offered only multilingual translation and integrated commerce, attracting an international audience (fans from 200+ regions).
By July 2020, The Korea Times reported Weverse had exceeded 10 million downloads. The app experienced particularly explosive growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, making Weverse the first to pioneer the fandom platform category.
Weverse’s report frames the fandom platform as a system that can convert casual fans into deeply engaged superfans through feature development and artist partnerships. But that growth story comes with a strategic tension: when momentum relies heavily on megastars, the platform has to keep diversifying or risk volatility.
A Four-Stage Fan Engagement
Weverse’s analysis of 30 million users engaging with 32 features across 2024–2025 reveals four stages of fan engagement, with 15% of users becoming more active over time, and 20% of superfans started as casual users. This conversion capacity shows how fan-deepening journeys can drive long-term growth.
These stages track user progression by visit frequency. Explorers visit weekly or less, light fans once or twice weekly, engaged fans every two days, and superfans visit frequently.
Weverse outlines four stages of the fandom journey:
- Exploration: Weekly or less frequent visitors with minimal activity.
- Appreciation: Light fans visiting once or twice weekly to consume artist content
- Interaction: Engaged fans visiting every two days, participating in commercial activities
- Amplification: Superfans seeking collectibles and in-person events, driving offline culture
From “exploration” to “amplification,” fandom has become a path to growth for the Weverse app. The implications are greater as fandom has stages that reflect the development of their relationship with the artist.
As fans move deeper, they don’t just watch and scroll. They communicate, participate, and increasingly buy, especially collectibles and event-related goods.
In other words, Weverse creates products to move fans through these stages by continually giving them reasons to return.
Growth Drivers and Artist Impact
In Artists Power Weverse section, BTS and BLACKPINK were the primary catalysts for the platform’s expansion.
The seven-member group achieved a 300%+ surge in new followers after their June 2025 full-group reunion, becoming the first community to surpass 30 million followers and pushing Weverse to a record 12 million monthly active users.
Meanwhile, BLACKPINK became the first girl group to exceed 10 million community followers.
Together, these two acts added 6.5 million followers in 2025.
In addition to top artists, 11 rookie groups debuted on the platform and attracted over 4.4 million community followers.
KATSEYE surpassed 2.3 million followers with 490% year-over-year growth in average Weverse LIVE viewership.
The combination of BTSand BLACKPINK’s follower surge, alongside growth from global and new artist communities, drove Weverse to its highest engagement levels.
Service Innovation: Listening Party as Engineered Togetherness
The report highlights “superfan services” built to convert participation into momentum.
Since launching Listening Party, which lets fans stream music together in real time, in March 2025, 107 artist communities hosted 52,580 sessions, generating 15.7 million streams with 9.37 million participants.
Example cited in the report:
- BTS’s single listening party generated 1.67 million streams, and
- ENHYPEN’s ENGENE fandom hosted a 168-hour consecutive listening party.
This matters because it turns fandom into a shared activity rather than a personal habit. A Listening Party is a structured time. It encourages repeat visits, social proof, and the feeling of “being there,” even when fans are continents apart. It’s not just engagement, it’s engineered togetherness.
Global Expansion
After major growth in China in 2024, Latin America’s market saw a 22% year-over-year increase in users in 2025. The region also saw a 715% surge in digital merchandise sales, making it the fastest-growing market for the category. Other regions, such as North America and Asia, also grew as BTS’s return reactivated fans globally.
That signals fandom commerce is expanding fastest in regions where communities organize quickly online and where digital products can travel more easily than physical inventory.
Weverse expanded its J-pop roster to 20 artists in 2025. The platform connects Japanese artists to fans in about 161 countries and regions. It also welcomed international pop artists like Fifth Harmony and Christopher.
Weverse is positioning itself as a global “home base” or “superfan hub,” not a single-genre destination.
Engagement and Commerce Metrics
The report says about 2025 activity across 178 international artists:
- Fans made 90 million posts and 213 million comments.
- Average monthly engagement time reached 263 minutes per user (up from 237 minutes in 2024)
- Artists hosted 6,558 Weverse LIVE sessions, which generated over 1 billion cumulative views.
- 25.2 million products sold on Weverse Shop. This drove digital product purchases more than double year-over-year.
- Communities with 3+ million followers nearly doubled, while those exceeding 2 million tripled.
This shows that Weverse is not simply tracking fandom behavior. It’s productizing it, mapping how fans deepen, then building tools that make that deepening easier, more social, and more monetizable.
Strategic Implications = Superfan Monetization
Weverse’s 2025 Fandom Trend Report shows that the superfan monetization market is gaining momentum. The platform operates as a direct-to-fan hub through UMG and HYBE’s strategic partnership, reaching 12 million monthly active users in 2025.
Citing from Weverse’s 2025 Fandom Trend Report, Joon Choi (President of Weverse Company), stated,
“In 2025, Weverse solidified its position as the leading global superfan hub by harnessing fan participation and artist-driven momentum.”
He added,
“Led by a deeper understanding of diverse engagement dynamics, we are committed to building a seamless ecosystem that empowers both fans and artists at every stage of their journey.”
Weverse reached 12 million monthly active users in 2025, with users spending an average of 263 minutes monthly and generating 303 million posts and comments.
Yet, the platform’s growth remains heavily dependent on major artists. BTS’s comeback alone generated a 300% surge in followers. This concentration risk could limit sustainability without broader artist diversification across the roster.
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