Portals Shedding Unprofitable Services
By Kim Hyun-cheol
Staff Reporter
Portal Web sites are gearing up to slash unprofitable services in an attempt to cope with the economic downturn.
NHN, the nation's premier online firm, said Tuesday it will terminate its Web cartoon service from its portal site, Naver, as of Feb. 19.
Starting with the suspension of its provision of culture and art news through the World Town service in November, Naver has shut down eight services, including the Web cartoon.
Daum.net, Naver's archrival, also closed a user-created contents section last week and will close down two more services by next month. The Web site stopped offering five services last year.
More closures are expected, as SK Broadband plans to merge its two portal sites, Empas.com and Nate.com, into a newly integrated Web site under the new name "Nate." Other huge overhauls are on the way.
Belt-tightening is not confined to Korean providers. Google, the world's largest Web search portal, recently said it will suspend six services, including Dodgeball, a social networking service it acquired for $30 million in 2005.
Google is laying off 100 staff recruiters at its branches worldwide, accounting for nearly 25 percent of the company's personnel department overseas.
Industry watchers say the closures of services are a direct consequence of the frozen economy.
``It seems inevitable that Internet firms are picking and choosing to opt for more competitive services and close unprofitable ones,'' a spokesman at an Internet company said on condition of anonymity. NHN reported its first decline in sales in the third quarter last year, the first time since its listing on the KOSDAQ in October 2002. NHN's smaller rivals are now searching for new growth engines.
Late last year, SK launched a mobile edition of Cyworld, the nation's best-known social networking Web site, while Daum set off a mobile Daum.net edition, which is available in a full browser on mobile phones.
Online maps provide a new battlefield. Daum launched a detailed photographic map of Korea last week and Naver is already providing the same sort of service, although the visualized region is currently confined to Seoul and its surroundings.