By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
The competition between the nation's two biggest Internet companies, NHN and Daum, is more lopsided than a fight between Tom and Jerry. However, when limiting the analysis to blog services alone, it seems evident that Daum is mounting a meaningful challenge against the undisputed industry kingpin.
As Web portals increasingly rely on user-generated content to attract traffic, blogs, or personal online journals, are becoming the center of competition.
NHN, which operates the country's most popular Web site, Naver (www.naver.com), still has the most blog subscribers, but sees Daum approaching in the rear-view mirror.
According to market research company Rankey.Com (www.rankey.com), Daum's blog services attracted more than 16.4 million unique visitors last month, which represents nearly a 72 percent increase from January 2007 and is up about 6 percent from last year's numbers.
The report, which tracks the traffic data for blogs and social networking services (SNS) over the past two years, also revealed that the popularity of Cyworld (www.cyworld.com), operated by SK Communications, is steadily declining.
Cyworld's SNS services garnered over 17 million visitors in January, edging Daum and trailing only Naver overall. However, the numbers represented a nine percent drop from a year earlier and nearly a 12 percent decline from the same month in 2007.
Naver's blog services garnered 22.2 million-plus visitors in January, about an eight percent increase from two years ago but down nearly 3 percent from the same period last year.
Yahoo!Korea (www.yahoo.co.kr)'s blog services garnered about 5.6 million visitors last month, followed by Empas (www.empas.com) ' blog services, to be operated by SK Communications' Nate (www.nate.com) from next month, which had 3.7 million visitors.
Internet companies have been competing to improve their blog services and maximize user-generated content to increase their search traffic. The companies also believe that blogs may potentially offer new opportunities in online advertising. As search engines do, they tend to segment users by interest.
Since acquiring the Tistory blog services from Tatter & Company (TNC) in 2007, Daum has been shaking the hierarchy in blogging services.
Tistory is popular among users for its sophisticated functions and extensive freedom in designing blog interfaces, and Daum is looking to interconnect its blogging platform with its other Web services, such as its recently unveiled digital map services, to further differentiate itself from its competitors.
Cyworld is also experimenting with a variety of services to keep users interested, one of which is ``Mini Life,'' which allows subscribers to use animated, three-dimensional (3D) characters to enjoy games, chatting and other features.
Despite its slowing growth in recent years, Cyworld is confident in its wealth of quality content, which SK Communications hopes to maximize to drive up Nate's search traffic.
Although Cyworld trails Naver in its number of visitors, its 10.5 billion in page views is triple Naver's 3.2 billion, indicating that Cyworld users spend more time on their sites than users of rival services.
Naver has also been fine-tuning its blogging services and is currently experimenting with ``Open Cast,'' which allows bloggers to feed their content to a customized section on the Web site's main page.
thkim@koreatimes.co.kr">thkim@koreatimes.co.kr
