Media 2.0 and the Korean laboratory
+8* Korea ThoughtsPublished January 31, 2008 at 11:56 am No CommentsAnyone involved in publishing today feels sympathetic to the music industry. Largely, they share the same headaches. In January we were in South Korea to guide a group of CEOs of the largest European publishing companies.
You might wonder: what has South Korea to tell them? The market is small, and the Korean wave is so strong in Asia that a Western-style newspaper or magazine could not grasp a significant market share. Well, those top publisher CEOs were spending 4 days there to study, learn and find new ideas to ensure the future of their business.
:: Digital Korea presentation on SlideShare ::
:: Chang Kim’s post on Web 2.0 Asia (Korea’s leading blog provider CEO) ::
Is Internet killing printed media?
Print media came along 500 years ago and was the world’s first mass media. In the 90s, Internet became the 6th mass media after recordings, cinema, radio and television. All those new media changed part of the game after their introduction, but Internet has change the whole game for all the previous media.
As a market indicator, the stock price of the New York Times has been divided by four. Most newspaper companies are restructuring when not disappearing altogether. And all ask those questions: what are the new services we should offer? And what are the business models?
Digital Korea
South Korea is an interesting place to visit if you work in media. First, because the country has the world’s highest “Internet literacy”: broadband is among the fastest and cheapest on earth, and Koreans have been using it for almost 10 years, which considerably influenced many industries and people’s lifestyles. Even a blind date in an Internet café playing Starcraft barely raises an eyebrow – and letting the girl win would be remarked as being romantic.
The Korean Internet market is also very interesting because neither Yahoo nor Google has a significant presence. One might argue that China is the same, but Korea is more interesting because Yahoo HAD a presence, then local portals found new services and passed it.
Among the most interesting services were Daum’s forums called “Cafes”. Started in the early 2000 this was the first form of “online community” and ensured a couple of years of dominance to Daum, today’s second largest Internet portal in Korea. Then, Naver, currently the leading portal, launched its “Knowledge Search” service in 2002. Yahoo concept-copied it and launched its “Q&A” service in 2005, closely followed by Baidu’s “Zhidao” service. Who knows the concept was created in Korea three years earlier? Who knows that Naver’s service has evolved and become incredibly useful and sophisticated in the 5 years since launch? Just like precious objects or knowledge would travel via unclear roads in ancient times, innovation walks on mysterious ways.
The Knowledge Search service might be the first mass implementation of so-called “semantic web” (focused on meaning rather than keywords) – sometimes seen as the essence of “Web 3.0”. It helped Naver become the undisputed Internet leader for the following 5 years. Since 2007, two things happened: Daum launched a “User-Created Content” (UCC) service, which is another form of “semantic web”, and Naver made a mistake.
Media now has a return channel
What was that mistake? Very simple: during the Korean presidential elections campaign, Naver stopped the “comment” function on political news. Doing this, Naver tried to come back to a “broadcast mode”, while Koreans are now so used to have discussions online. The move backfired quickly as netizens claimed Naver was protecting the establishment, and moved in flocks to Daum’s news portal.
Far from being a mere Internet anecdote, it says a lot about how people now see media. As said by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1914) “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”.
