NHNs SNS draws over 5 mil. users

NHN Corp., the operator of Korea's most-visited search engine, said Wednesday that its social networking service has attracted more than 5 million subscribers, outstripping Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. in the domestic market.

The number of subscribers to NHN's me2DAY microblogging service surpassed the 5 million mark as of Wednesday, and it is expected to double to 10 million by the end of the year, a company spokeswoman said by phone.

As of early March, Twitter had 3 million users in Korea, according to OikoLab. Facebook, the world's largest social networking service, had 4 million subscribers in the country, according to market researcher Socialbakers.

The number of subscribers for me2DAY, which allows users to share short messages through mobile devices as well as on PCs, grew by five-fold from one year ago, the company said, helped by the fast adoption of smartphones in the world's most wired nation.

NHN owns Naver.com, a Web portal that handles more than 70 percent of the country's search queries and offers blogs, Web-based e-mail, news and other content.

Since acquiring me2DAY in January 2009, NHN has placed the service at the center of its push in the social networking market, which grew quickly after the mobile boom that hit the country later in 2009. (Yonhap)