Internet Users Give Thumbs Down to New Naver Web Site
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Did Naver (www.naver.com), Korea's most popular Web site, throw out the baby with the bathwater?
Although company officials disagree, Internet users seem to be reacting with a resounding ``yes'' after enduring the mess that is the new version of Naver's main page.
NHN, the company that operates Naver, deployed dramatic changes to Naver's facade in the New Year, allowing users a personalized homepage to access news, e-mail, blog postings, entertainment and other content all in one place, basically an emulation of the iGoogle start page.
Five days into its debut, however, and the new design is generating more frustration than excitement, with users complaining that the customized formats for subscribing to news and blog content are too complicated.
The most noticeable change to the Web site is ``News Cast,'' which offers direct links to the Internet pages of news organizations, unlike Naver's old news box, which was edited by in-house staff.
In News Cast, NHN is basically throwing a bone to media outlets, who had constantly complained about Naver using their articles to hog online traffic.
It's perhaps too early to tell whether Naver's revamped news format is a hit or a miss, as even company officials admit there is a need to tweak a couple of parts. But, as the rants on Naver's messageboard attest, the early impression has been ugly, at least from a user point of view.
The heart of the criticisms lies in claims that by introducing News Cast, Naver gave up what made its news services so popular in the first place ― speed and simplicity.
Internet users who have grown accustomed to the easy-to-read layout of Naver's old news section clearly prefer the company's editors to pick and feed the news stories to them, rather than they themselves going to the trouble of probing headlines from 36 different news sources, as they do now.
Users are also complaining that they can't leave comments on the articles without subscribing to the individual site, and the endless streams of adult advertisements on the Web sites of the media outlets is considered a problem as well.
``As the heavy dose of sexual content shows, news organizations have been designing their Web pages to increase the number of clicks, but invested less thought into making them efficient platforms to provide information, which is why they lost all the traffic to portals in the first place,'' said an industry official, who declined to be named.
``Now, News Cast is exposing them for that,'' he said.
Although news organizations have pouted about Naver getting all the page views, most of them seemed ill-prepared for the increase in traffic driven by News Cast.
Since Naver revamped its news services, many local newspapers are reporting that the daily traffic at their Web sites have tripled or doubled, with one site even claiming a 10-fold jump.
Media Today (www.mediatoday.co.kr), a peer-review journal, saw its traffic rise by seven times on Jan. 1, which had to crash the site temporarily, forcing the company to add a new server.
``Open Cast,'' a section that enables users to customize their blog subscriptions and provide bloggers with a bigger platform to publish and share their content, was another import change.
Although the section is part of Naver's efforts to utilize user-generated content, they are finding it hard to pick the blog contents they want to subscribe to when the number of ``casts'' exceed 900.
Despite loud complaints, NHN looks unfazed by the early confusion, with a spokesman saying that it is only a matter of Internet users getting used to the new looks.
That could be right, as Naver dominates Web traffic, controlling more than 75 percent of all search queries.
``We can't control how news organizations design their Web sites, but we will constantly talk with them for improvements,'' said the Naver official.
Perhaps, Naver could afford to take a step back when its industry rival, Daum, is also stumbling out of the gate in 2009. Daum is desperate to muster a serious challenge against Naver and hoped that an earlier start in digital map services would help it gain a foothold.
Daum is convinced that the quality of its photographic map, which provides a picture quality of up to 50 centimeters per pixel, sets the industry bar. The problem is that nobody has yet to see it.
Daum had initially planned to reveal the map services in late November, but the launch has been delayed until sometime this month, with the company still unable to sort out security issues with government authorities over the exposure of some sites.