Naver is Korea’s largest portal site.Focusing on portal services such as search engines, it provides various content theme boards such as news, sports, entertainment, and shopping, as well as community services such as blogs, cafes, and posts.
Line’s own messenger and knowledge encyclopedia service make it easy to find reliable information in search results, and it is building a professional DB by providing 33 language dictionaries including Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese.
South Korea is one of the few countries where Google, which has conquered most of the world’s search markets, has failed to conquer and still has the No. 1 native portal. Other exceptions include Japan, China’s Baidu, and Russia’s Yandex, where Yahoo! Japan (Naver-Softbank joint venture) holds out.
As such, Naver’s impact on the Korean market is absolute.
Naver has been listed on the Japanese messenger market and has also settled on the NASDAQ market in the United States.
In Japan, active services are provided with rapid response and change, but it has not yet been activated significantly in the U.S. market.
Currently, it has such a huge impact and subscriber customer DB, so its role as an online window for each media outlet is dominant.
Since the launch of the Naver service, the main screen has been continuously reorganized while maintaining the large framework of the so-called “green window” and real-time search word service at the top of the screen, as the web page design trend has changed from realistic to simple and intuitive description.
The real-time search word service helped to identify social issues and trends, but the policy was changed to display real-time search words only after the 21st general election on April 15, 2020 due to suspicions of manipulation As it is the most active online community, if indiscriminate and unverified articles and controlless articles were always loopholes in the service, they were recently expelled from Naver Online under the pretext of public relations articles (planning articles) of influential media in Korea.
I wonder if Korean media should be under Naver’s control and control. Perhaps because it is a portal site dealing with the largest public, even ordinary media outlets could not rely on their enormous influence. If it provides valuable information to appeal to its own public and is a neutral mass-oriented media media, it will be competitive.In addition, shopping is expanding commercial feasibility to the public through catagory, and using its own payment system, travel, hotels, and airlines.
It also provides services such as purchasing general goods. I wonder how far Naver’s continuous growth and service development will affect.
EJ SONG
ASIA JOURNAL
