(c)news1（KOREA WAVE）

Korean Internet giants, changing power structure...The day when YouTube overtook KakaoTalk, which overtook Naver.

KakaoTalk has maintained the No. 1 position on the South Korean platform for the past three years, but You Tube is now hot on its heels. According to the Mobile Index, KakaoTalk ranked first in May with 41.46 million MAUs (monthly actual users), only 510,000 behind second-place YouTube (40.95 million), and the gap is expected to shrink to 2.99 million in 2020, 2.27 million in 2021, 1.53 million in 2022, and 510,000 this year. The gap is gradually narrowing.

The third-placed user, Naver, had 38.89 million users.

The IT industry believes that YouTube is likely to overtake KakaoTalk's MAUs in the second half of this year.

In terms of total monthly usage time (May), YouTube (1,522.23 million hours) has already tripled that of KakaoTalk (536.55 million hours).

The reason why YouTube has been able to compete with traditional platforms in South Korea is due to the growing preference for visual information such as images and videos, especially among Generation Z (born in the mid-1990s to early 2000s).

According to a survey by Consumer Data Platform, the platform most heavily used by South Korean teenage users for information search in February was YouTube (88.4%), which also exceeded Naver (87%).

In response to YouTube's offensive, Naver and Kakao are focusing on revamping their own services. Neighbor is focusing on the advancement of search using artificial intelligence (AI), and will launch "Search GPT" (tentative name), a search service based on a super-large language model, by the end of this year.

In addition, Kakao is striving to improve convenience by introducing last month a function to "quietly exit a group chat room" with a separate tab for open chat in KakaoTalk.

(c) KOREA WAVE/AFPBB News

Source: https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/06a9ac70d4da9899df260d8a687ebf645ed74a17