Kakao co-CEO offers individual creators chance to select, edit content
Kakao co-CEO Cho Soo-young speaks in an interview released by Kakao on Aug. 1. Courtesy of Kakao
By Kim Jae-heun
Kakao co-CEO Cho Soo-young said that he believes in providing content based on creators' individual choices, rather than based on algorithms or search rankings. The IT giant has recently adopted a subscription service for its content channels.
“The real-time rankings of searched keywords and news content displayed on the portal website are the information that we have mainly consumed up until now,” said Cho in an interview video that Kakao released online recently. “But I do not believe it is appropriate for people to find their interests based on the search rankings of certain words.”
Cho has been striving to offer unbiased news items via algorithms, but he admitted that this attempt has failed. Cho wanted to provide information based on individual perspectives.
This attempt led the company to get rid of the “#tap” function and instead to introduce a “view” function that collects news stories and video material.
“I hope that this function will offer people the opportunity to re-examine the importance of the services and content that they choose. Minor stories that have not received people's attention will continue to be outside of people's scope unless somebody brings them into the light,” Cho said.
Kakao's co-CEO added that creators are no longer those who only make content but are those who aggregate quality content as well.
“Media can only be made by editing. Editors will come into the spotlight now and profit from this system. Kakao's new view service will generate a lot of influential media as a result,” Cho said.
For now, Cho has asked customers to bear with the inconveniences of going through this change in the system of consuming information via the platform.
“Once the content from various individuals' perspectives becomes available, there will be more creators delivering unique messages,” Cho said.
There have been mixed assessments of Kakao's newly launched view service in August. Editors on the page are given a bulletin board to provide various content, such as news, music, video and text of their interest.