Global Search Engine Marketing & Social Media News And Analysis » Korea

Korean Search Engine Naver Will Expand Internationally

Gemma Birch — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:45:13 +0000

South Korea has long been one of the most advanced web markets, with high internet penetration and fast connectivity. It is also one of the few markets where Google has failed to make an impact, with local search engine Naver holding over 72% market share.

Jae Choi, CEO at NHN USA, a branch of NHN, the company which owns and developed Naver will be speaking at the International Search Summit New York on 12th September, offering delegates a unique insight into the Korean market.

In advance of the Summit, we spoke to Kyle Choi , SEM Manager at NHN USA, to find out some more about the search engine and the opportunities available to marketers targeting a Korean audience.

Can you share the bit of background to Naver?
Naver was created by six former Samsung SDS search engine developers and the company was first established as ‘Naver Com’ in 1999, later merging with ‘Hangame’ to become the company it is today. NHN Corporation, which operates both Naver and Hangame, currently has 3,500 employees in our headquarters alone. In 2008, NHN become the first Korean internet company to reach one trillion KRW in sales ($900 million +) and has an annual growth rate of 10 to 20%. Naver has also recently solidified our leading position in the mobile search market.

Like Yandex & Baidu, Naver has developed a search engine specifically for its local market. What has made it so successful there?
Naver was able to achieve success in Korea because it provides search results that have been optimized for Korean users. ‘Comprehensive Search’ Naver’s basic search algorithm, does more than list search results; it pulls together multiple categories of results on one page which are optimized for the user. Naver invests a lot of attention into search modeling, and has invested time in developing ‘collection ranking’ and ‘multi-ranking’, to provide individual and relevant search experiences. Naver displays daily trends on the top of the page in order to offer information that most accurately meets the users’ search needs.

What are the key characteristics of the Korean search market? What makes it different from other markets?
The Korean search market suffered from a shortage of web documents written in the Korean language. Since search quality depended on the quantity of web documents, securing Korean web documents was vital. This led to the development of UGCs as well as Knowledge Search. Naver’s Knowledge iN, which opened a new chapter in the history of Korea’s search market because not only did Naver’s Knowledge iN Service coin the term “knowledge search”, it created the knowledge search culture and documented knowledge that was locked inside the human mind. Knowledge Search is Naver’s equivalent to Yahoo Answers, which was actually developed based on Naver’s Knowledge iN, after Yahoo! engineers visited the search engine to benchmark their service.

Is knowledge of the Korean language required in order to advertise on Naver? What options are open to non-Korean speaking marketers?
Advertising in Korean language with understanding of Korean culture can bring the most efficient results. However, advertisers don’t need to speak Korean. NHN USA offers not only translation for keywords, titles and descriptions, but also localization consultancy to provide recommendations for localizing for the Korean market and all reports can be delivered in English.

Does Naver have any plans to expand into international markets?
Naver is different from Google because Naver aims at offering services that has been optimized for the region by providing localized search services. Naver launched a search service in Japan, named Naver Japan, which offers new services that aren’t available in Korea’s Naver, such as “Matome”, which was designed to reflect the Japanese culture, where people hold intense discussions while collecting material about a certain subject. NHN plans to expand its search service to regions that have cultural similarities, allowing us to demonstrate our expertise in providing localized search services.

However, as games are not as influenced by the market’s culture in the same way that search is, NHN plans to enter the global market with our game business and has set detailed plans to embark into the European market.

If you had just one tip for organisations targeting a Korean audience, what would it be?
Korean users are used to getting customized search services, so rather than providing a common globalized service, try to appeal to the Korean users by offering a more unique, localized service. It’s difficult to give one tip on how to target a Korean audience, since a country’s culture cannot be easily defined on paper.

Finally, why attend the International Search Summit?
ISS is very unique opportunity to meet professionals in the international search field and to share information about the global search market. For Naver, it is a great opportunity to introduce the search engine and the Korean market to a new audience.

Early Bird Rates for the International Search Summit will expire on Saturday August 2oth. Other speakers include Yandex, Topsy, Autodesk and WebCertain.

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Korean Mobile Messenger App To Take On Twitter and Facebook

Gemma Birch — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:21:55 +0000

Kakao Talk, a Korean Mobile Messaging App, is to launch an aggressive international campaign to grow its subscriber base and compete with global giants Facebook and Twitter. The free messaging service, which currently has 9 million subscribers in South Korea, and a further 1 million around the world, is compatible with Apple and Android Operating Systems and is currently used in 216 countries.

The app enables users to send text messages, as well as links, files and photos and is currently available in Korean, English and Japanese. Kakao plans to set up offices in the US and Japan by the end of the year and believes its success in markets such as the Middle East, where the app isn’t available in local languages, demonstrates the opportunities of going global in a mobile age.

Kakao Founder Kim Beom-su is confident that the app can provide real competition for Facebook and Twitter, although he admits it may seem like a David and Goliath fight.

It certainly does seem an impressive goal, given the global dominance of Facebook in particular, but as the mobile web continues to grow, there may be room in the mobile space for some alternatives.

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Strong opportunity for mobile marketers in Asia-Pacific

Motoko Hunt — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:57:15 +0000

The Mobile Marketing Association announced the results of its Annual Global Mobile Attitude and Usage Study conducted in 2008. The markets surveyed in the Asia Pacific segment of the study include: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. It shows the strong market opportunity for mobile marketers in APAC region.

The study’s key findings for the selected Asia Pacific markets include:

* Overall, heavy penetration and reliance on mobile phones combine with strong feature and mobile web usage in these regions to indicate strong market opportunity for mobile marketers.
o In total, the top five mobile phone features used are non-voice in nature and include camera, games, text messaging, saving images to a photo library and MP3 player.
o Strong use of text messaging and mobile web (61% and 36% overall respectively) indicates mobile phone users in these regions are willing to view their mobile devices as full scale communication devices not restricted to voice services.

* Over one-third report using mobile web and one-in-five use it on a weekly basis.
o Common applications include news, browsing the internet, accessing mobile specific sites, and visiting sites related to music, weather and entertainment.

* Overall receptiveness and interest in opting-in to mobile marketing efforts is fairly strong; nearly half (48%) are moderately/highly interested in mobile marketing and more than half are somewhat/highly likely to opt-in to mobile marketing efforts.
o Applications that garner the greatest interest include mobile coupon, status alerts regarding current accounts or products owned and alerts for special sales and discounts.

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SEMPO expands the reach to APAC region

Motoko Hunt — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:03:05 +0000

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) announced its launch of SEMPO APAC Committee.

SEMPO APAC plans and organizes SEMPO activities in the Asia-Pacific region to educate the market, grow membership and awareness of the Online & Search Marketing Industry, as well as to provide support to working groups under SEMPO APAC. Currently the committee has volunteers from China, Japan, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Jakarta, Australia and the US. Committee representatives are highly regarded industry professionals in each market, and are frequent speakers at local industry events.

SEMPO APAC’s recent activities include a series of webinars, seminars, networking meetings, an Asia tour with SEMPO leadership conducted in Beijing, Mumbai, and Singapore, as well as market surveys carried out in India, Japan, and Singapore.

“Our development in Asia-Pacific has been inspiring. The teams that have come together to form Working Groups are passionate and continue to drive growth. We are pleased to see the APAC team focus on the broader region to include Australia and surrounding markets. With 41% of the Internet Users in Asia-Pacific, SEMPO will continue to make a commitment in the region. We are thrilled with the Asia-Pacific talent that continues to take leadership roles in SEMPO.” Sara Holoubek, president of SEMPO Board of Directors said. ”

For more information visit http://www.sempo.org/public_groups/apac/ or write to Motoko Hunt (Chair of SEMPO APAC & Multilingual Search editor) apac-chair “at” sempo.org

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ComScore Reveals Google Share by Market

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:39:39 +0000

Via Adage, ComScore has revealed the Google share by market showing the Google domination in many markets alongside discrepancies such as Korea where Google has a dismal share of the market. Western Europe has stronger Google shares than the US but the Mountain View monolith is most powerful in Brazil, Turkey and Italy.

Unfortunately, with China and Russia missing – the picture is somewhat one-sided.

Google Share by Market – ComScore

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Google expands new trademark policy – but sidesteps Europe

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:12:38 +0000

Following the expansion of their trademark policy to the UK last year, Google has widened its looser trademark policy which basically allows all-comers to bid on trademark keywords increasing the cost of trademark advertising via the number one search engine and allowing competitors to aggressively buy each others ‘marks. The new change expands the ‘we won’t intervene’ approach to a total of 190 countries. The change comes into force on June 4th.

However, Google has sidestepped the key European countries with the strongest legal rules and where cases have cost Google most in fines (see list below). From calculations, the removal of protection for trademarked terms increases advertiser costs by as much as 80% – as well as taking revenue from additional advertisers on those terms. The policy, therefore, enables Google to increase its adverising take from advertisers. The approach also affects major global brands most significantly – because they generally spend proportionately more on advertising their brands because it is those brands – and the associated products – which have made them global.

Google has long struggled to persuade blue chip advertisers to move more of their advertising budgets to Google Adwords – this is step which leaves them with no choice. However, it is a dangerous move as it could also contribute to tipping the ROI see-saw towards other newer forms of promotion such as social media and Twitter.

Having received no significant kick-back from its UK change of a year ago – it’s no surprise that this is being rolled out now. Probably, another year will pass before more countries – especially European ones – are added. I predict that France, where the courts have levied the largest fines against Google, will be the last to go.

So the following countries (European Union countries in bold) will not see the change – at least yet. Via Search Engine Land

Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Czech Republic
Cyprus
Denmark
Finland
France
Greece
Germany
Hungary
Italy
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden

Australia
Bahamas
Brazil
China
Iceland
Macau
New Zealand
Norway
South Korea
Switzerland
Taiwan

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Ebay consumes Korean competitor – helps Yahoo

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:56:38 +0000

ORF.at reports that Ebay has acquired 67% of South Korean competitor Gmarket for $1.2 billion and becomes the market leader in South Korea. Ebay has already bought 67% of shares listed on the New York NASDAQ.

Large beneficiaries of the move are both Yahoo and Interpark which were major shareholders in Gmarket owning a combined 39%. South Korea is the world’s 6th largest online market and Gmarket has 10 million registered users. The deal has been approved by competition authorities with certain conditions.

South Korea is also a market where Google struggles and previously Google and Ebay were small in market share terms. Ebay has a property called Internet Auction there which focuses on electrical items and sports gear. Yahoo is more successful – indirectly – thanks to its relationship with number one search engine Naver.

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Google acquires Korean blogging platform TNC

Nick Wilsdon — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:31:27 +0000

Is Google finally becoming serious in approaching the Korean market? Joop Dorresteijn reports that blogging platform TNC has been acquired by Google today; making them the first acquired company by Google in Korea. (who’s counting anyway) TNC offers a blogging platform similar to Automatic, the application behind WordPress.

Source: TheNextWeb

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Asia-Pacific search engine rankings for April 2008

Motoko Hunt — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:54:25 +0000

comScore just released an interesting data about the search rankings in Asia-Pacific region. According to their data, Google and Yahoo were the regional leaders as “top search properties” followed by China’s Baidu.

“Because Google and Yahoo! have a strong presence in many Asia-Pacific countries, they account for the majority of searches conducted in the overall region,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. “However, there are several strong, local country search engines that also play a significant role in the region. Most notably, the dominant search engine in China, Baidu.com, accounts for one out of every six searches in Asia-Pacific notwithstanding the fact that its users are primarily from China.”

What interesting is that 5 out of the Top 10 Search Properties in Asia-Pacific (April 2008) were the region based engines such as Korea’s Naver and China’s Alibaba.

comScore’s data also shows the country by country breakdown of Internet audience in the region. China ranks #1 with 82,814,000 unique searchers and Japan ranks #2 with 60,050,000 unique searchers. Korean searchers have most number of searches per searcher (103.5) followed by Japan’s 102.6 searches per searcher.

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Post Collection on South Korean Internet

Nick Wilsdon — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:40:41 +0000

Joop Dorresteijn has started a series of posts which aim to explore the South Korean internet market. The series is not complete yet but one to bookmark if you’re looking for information on one of the most active internet markets globally.

Introduction to the South-Korean web series
A profile of the connectivity in South Korea
Why so little Korean web companies get ‘Techcrunched’
Introduction to five popular Korean websites
Social community Cyworld a trendsetter in E-commerce?

It looks like he will continue the series to give us an overview of the main search engines in the country, Naver.cm, Daum.net, Empas.com and Nate.com.

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ComScore turns attention to worldwide search activity

Nick Wilsdon — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:16:19 +0000

The research group comScore has released their first report looking at worldwide search activity, carried out over the month of August. Interesting reading to those dealing with multilingual marketing and a sign of the growing importance of this sector.

The Asia-Pacific region, which includes large markets such as China, Japan and India, saw 258 million unique searchers conduct 20.3 billion searches. Europe reported the second-most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches. The Latin American region demonstrated the heaviest search activity per person, with more than 95 searches per searcher in August. The search market in the Middle East-Africa region is the most underdeveloped thus far, with the fewest searchers (30 million), searches (2 billion), and searches per searcher (70).

The report also found that in terms of worldwide search property, MSN has now lost third position to the Chinese engine Baidu. Korea’s Naver has also made a strong appearance at 5th place.

Google Sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August with 37.1 billion searches conducted. Of that total number, 31 billion occurred at the Google search engine and 5 billion occurred at YouTube.com. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft Sites ranked in fourth place worldwide, while Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches worldwide.

Source: ComScore

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Fastest growth in China, Russia and South Korea domains

Nick Wilsdon — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:01:49 +0000

According to Verisign, InsideDomaining reports, the Top 3 countries with the highest growth rate for their country code top-level-domain extensions are the following:

1. China: .cn (402% increase)

2. Russia: ru

3. South Korea: .kr

China (.cn) has now become the fifth most popular country code extension globally, as Yahoo! finance points out, this was no doubt helped by an aggressive price cutting promotion this year

The price promotion – which reduced the fee to register a website domain name to approximately 14 cents Cdn for the first year – led to a 402 per cent growth in domain names registered with “.cn” from the previous year.

Korea has also been given a boost by the release of the first level extension, .kr this spring. Until then only second level versions of the domain had been available (most popular being co.kr).

Interestingly there have been no price or regulation changes to Russian domains (.ru) over this period.

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Google webmaster tools starts to think international

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:20:03 +0000

At least two major new features are arriving in Google’s webmaster tools console according to information from the SES San Jose conference and the official Google webmaster tools blog.

The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language – but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets.

The other new development which is currently being looked at, according to a senior Google source, is the addition of a tool within webmaster tools whereby you can specify the country your site relates to. The countries will be listed in a drop down list – and you’ll almost certainly only be able to choose once country per site.

For a long time it has been a problem if you site was a .com site with no history of activity in a country for Google to pick out the right ‘bucket’ in which to list your site. For some this was an embarrasment – for others a major business hurdle. Matters were worse for those .coms hosted in a country other than the one they were targeting – perhaps for business political or content management system reasons. The result was you might be targeting France with a site hosted in Norway – but not end up appearing in the ‘Pages Francophones’ of Google.fr – even if the language of the site was French.

The simplest way of solving this problem has always been to have local country domains in which case – contrary to what one SES panelist advised in San Jose, the hosting location becomes irrelevant. For many, this isn’t practical – hence the reason why some have chosen to host locally to get around the problem.

These two developments combined will help international SEO specialists manage their projects with less frustration!

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ICANN to give North Korea its own domain

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:55:20 +0000

North Korea is expected to get its own domain identity from ICANN, according to a France Press report via Inquirer.net.

Internet access in the North of Korea is strictly limited – but the award of an internet identity for the country is, at least, a stepping stone towards opening up to the rest of the world.

ICANN has recently also given a domain identity to Palestine – .ps.

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Google’s Schmidt: Just Getting Started In South Korea

Ebina — Wed, 30 May 2007 04:29:08 +0000

Google’s CEO Eric Schinidt has visited Korea this week to attend the Seoul Digital Forum 2007. “It’s obvious to me that Korea is a great laboratory of the digital age,” Schmidt said in a speech at the Seoul Digital Forum. On Tuesday, Schmidt met with Daum Communications Corp., South Korea’s No. 2 Internet search engine, to discuss broadening their partnership, Daum said. Daum late last year decided to end its advertising relationship with Yahoo Inc. in favor of using Google for paid search results. Schmidt has met Korea’s main mobile carriers SK Communications president Yoo Hyun-oh, too.

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.asia domain name to be launched

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 07:15:40 +0000

Foxnews reports that an organisation known as “DotAsia Organization Ltd” has had its application to run domain names in asian languages under the top level domain ‘.asia’ approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

The domains will cover China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other asian countries.

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Online advertising to exceed 10% of budgets in 8 markets by 2008

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 10:12:26 +0000

Media research firm Zenithoptimedia reports that 8 countries will dedicate more than 10% of their budgets to online marketing by 2008. Two countries will already cross that barrier this year – the UK adn Sweden – interestingly not the US.

The 8 countries are:-

Australia

Israel

Japan

Norway

South Korea

Taiwan

In 2008 it is estimated that 17.2% of marketing spend in the UK will dedicated to online and online will be ahead of cinema and outdoor forms of advertising and not far behind radio. Smaller advertisers in particular are to benefit from the affordability and targeting capabilities of the internet (which means ’search’ to you and me!!)

Internet advertising expenditure is to rise globally by 84% between 2005 and 2008.

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Social Networking catching up with Traditional Internet Portals

Sante J. Achille — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:42:47 +0000

A study by Web Stats company Compete provides insight on social networking growth and how traffic levels compare to portals. The analysis concludes that social networks are gathering significant momentum and are catching up with “traditional portals”.

The results presented have raised some questions, however the trend is there for all to see.

Read/Write Web provides information on users behaviour and top web 2.0 applications for the following countries:

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Iceland leading in broadband usage

Kristjan Mar Hauksson — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 12:27:37 +0000

Iceland (pop 300.000) is the most web-savvy country – a recent study shows it has the highest concentration of broadband users. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that broadband was also widespread in South Korea, the Netherlands and Denmark. USA still leads in most users, with nearly 50 million.

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Korean site drags Google into david-goliath match

Ebina — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 01:09:39 +0000

“Don’t be evil? Don’t trust Google!”

Google was accused by a Korean community site(www.humoruniv.com) of not paying the Korean site for having Google’s AdSense on its Web site for two months. The site was supposed to receive a check of around 20 million won, but only received an e-mail from Google saying that it terminated the contract because the site violated the program’s rules raising the number of clicks. Google refused to give evidence saying it is its “corporate policy to keep secret how the detecting system works.’’

The humoruniv web site has been flooded with negative comments and there are many claims from other web sites that were treated in the same way by Google after running Google’s AdSense.

The Korea Times

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