Thursday, January 24, 2008

An uphill battle?

The Korea Times has an article about YouTube's entry into Korea (heralded by the Metropolitician as well):
It is a belated arrival for YouTube in Korea, considering it is already operating localized services in 18 other nations. Google, which owns YouTube, has been cautious about expanding in Korea knowing that many other globally popular Web services of YouTube's caliber have failed to win over the Korean market.

Since the early days of the Internet boom in the late 1990s, Korean Internet users have shown a strong favor for locally grown sites. For example, Google and Yahoo respectively have less than 5 percent of the search-engine market share, while Korean search engines Naver, Daum, and Nate continue to prosper.
I recently discovered the well-written blog A Year in Mokpo and found a post about Google's failure to succeed against Naver in Korea, which addresses one unspoken reason why Korean internet users favor locally grown sites - they have no other choice.
However, the real reason behind Google's difficult path in Korea is that its highly praised search technology was rendered practically useless in the Korean language sphere when major portals decided to block Google search robots from crawling around the content they hold, industry observers universally note.
It'll be interesting to see how YouTube does in Korea.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since the early days of the Internet boom in the late 1990s, Korean Internet users have shown a strong favor for locally grown sites.

This works for every product on earth:

Since the early days of the _________ in the late XXXXs, Korean _________s have shown a strong favor for locally grown _____.

Anonymous said...

Does anybody know, therefore, where you can watch Korean music videos? i.e. a Korean equivelant to Youtube. The ones available on Youtube are a pretty poor collection. Or perhaps Koreans are not as diligent about putting stuff online.