Portals are Still Relevant in Korea
Naver and Daum, No.1 and 2 portal in Korea are still a top destination for content consumption and search
World Cup has finally ended last week. I was lucky to be in 3 different countries during the show, United States, Korea, and Japan. Since video content has geo streaming restriction, and YouTube does not offer proper video, I had to figure out how to watch this on my Galaxy Note 3 each time I went to the new country. After this exercise, I’ve found out that Korean portals provide so much better experience in terms of content consumption compared to US and Japan. Here’s some evidence.
1. Portal? Search engine?
Before going into the content part, you have to understand one thing. Korea is one of the very few countries Google haven’t been able to conquer.
Notable points from the table:
- China, Japan, Korea and Russia are the countries that Google isn’t #1
- Only in China and Korea, Google is not even #2
- Officially, Google does not provide service in mainland China
- Baidu(China) and Yandex(Russia) are Google-alike search engines / Naver/Daum(Korea) and Yahoo Japan are portals
- Yahoo Japan’s search result is actually powered by Google
In short, Naver and Daum are quite interesting in a way that they actually beat Google in search being portals without any special circumstances. Although it was not mentionedon the above table, Czech Republic’s long-time #1 portal Seznam and Taiwan’s Yahoo TW had fallen under Google’s powerful search technology only recently.
2. Content anchors search
How is the possible? Perhaps this is due to being such a powerful content destination unrivaled by anything else on the web. This time, I just wanted to give a quick comparison on World Cup content I mentioned in the beginning of the post.
Take a look at Daum’s World Cup special video section. Highlights are neatly organized according to the country and dates. Every video is HD quality and you can watch this anywhere, even with local commentary.
2nd screenshot from Yahoo JP. You can only look at the results and game summary without a video highlights. A bit disappointing.
Finally, Yahoo sports. Couldn’t even find a dedicated World Cup section. Maybe there was one the week before, but even from the screenshot you can feel that the user experience is somewhat mediocre compared to Korean/Japanese counterparts. (YES, that is a huge fraud Facebook banner!)
This is a very biased sample from World Cup events, but generally speaking, compared to counterparts outside Korea, Korean portals have always maintained the position as the top content destination. In US, as far as I know, there are top vertical sites that actually prevented portal taking that position. For the sports coverage, I think more people will go to ESPN, or even NBA/MLB/NFL for the best content. MLB has the exclusive TV content for baseball and you can pay for the content in the website for a subscription. However in a smaller market like Korea, the equivalent vertical websites lacked the capability, or didn’t have enough scale to build an independent online presence, so they rather decided to sell the content to portals like Naver or Daum. This was the same with the news publishers. If you visit websites of New York Times and Chosun(#1 circulation in Korea), you could immediately feel the gap.
This trend actually continued throughout 2000s and Korean web ecosystem was left without vertical websites but only with huge portals and content creators with mediocre websites who were just trying to become a content provider within the walled-garden of either Naver or Daum. Even if Google had superior search technology, if there’s nothing valuable in the web outside the portals, Google search results are often not very useful, and Naver knew this really well.
Things are changing a bit as people shifted to mobile in Korea nowadays. There are some interesting vertical sites that have emerged outside of Naver, and that is helping Google along with increased popularity of Chrome + Android dominance. However, Naver and Daum is still a top content destination, and as long as they can keep the best-of-breed content within their property, I believe their top position as search engine will be also untouched.
