By Yoon Ja-young
Park Young-sun, an office worker, used to play music videos on YouTube, while working as the globally popular content site has many things to offer. Recently, however, she isn’t doing that very often. “YouTube site has become so slow. It takes a while before it starts playing, and even when it starts, I have to wait a while shortly after the clip begins due to buffering,” she said.
According to Google Korea, YouTube’s operator, the connection to the site seems to have turned slow due to an increasing number of users. Google has been operating the user created content (UCC) site since acquiring it for $1.65 billion in 2006.
A representative for Google Korea said it is well aware of a slowdown, and is working on a solution.
She said that it seems that YouTube needed more bandwidth. Recently, more people are watching YouTube videos. People’s awareness of the video streaming site increased, which is good for the company, but it also has to deal with huge traffic flow. As YouTube deals with videos, it incurs much more traffic than other sites based on text. YouTube is seeing 35 hours of videos uploaded to it every minute.
Moreover, it is a globally open site. The whole world enjoys YouTube videos on a single platform. As YouTube doesn’t have a server in Korea, users here may find the service slower than users in other countries.
YouTube is also seeing explosive growth of mobile traffic here. Gautam Anand, the director for content partnerships for Asia Pacific in Google, said in an interview with Maeil Business Newspaper that over 20 percent of traffic in Korea comes from mobile phones, which is the highest in the world.
Two out of three smartphones here are based on Android, an operating system developed by Google. Android phones have YouTube services preloaded as default. Hence, those who weren’t familiar with the video streaming service site are now capable of easy access.
The representative for Google Korea said that it will come up with the solution before the third quarter at the latest.
According to Alexa, a Web information provider, Youtube ranked third in terms of traffic. The world’s top site was Google, followed by Facebook.
In Korea, the top site is portal Naver, followed by Google.com and Facebook. Local portal Daum ranked at fourth, and google.co.kr followed at fifth. YouTube ranked at sixth in the country’s top site list.