Naver, #1 internet portal in Korea, is changing their closed policy

You know which web service is most poplular in Korea ? If you look at Korean internet service dynamics a little bit, you can easily find that Google is not #1 in Korea, though it is Global #1.

Naver’s First Page

Naver is Korean #1 internet portal and its unique visitor is 31 million per month, which means 60 % of Korean people is visiting Naver at least once a month. Following is Korea Web site Ranking, as you can see Naver has the most unique visitor. On the other hand, Google’s unique visitor is around 5 million per month.

Also Naver’s market share in Korea search engine market is almost 60%, while Google has only 2% in Korea market.

Naver is blamed because its closed policy for searching and displaying. The contents of Naver’s service such as blog, cafe (community service), and Jisikin ( 지식인 in Korean, Yahoo answers and google answers copied this service) are searched only by Naver, not other search engine like Google. Even though Naver has a lot of Korean contents, they are provided and consumed only inside Naver world.

However, Naver seems to change their closed service policy a bit. Recently Naver opened  Developer Center, which support open source project and open API.

Currently Naver is supporting following eight open source projects including DBMS, collaboration development platform, contents management system and so on.

Also Naver is providing its data, contents, maps, search function as Open API for noncommercial use. It is including searching contents from Naver blog or cafe. Only around 2 weeks are passed since Naver opened Developer Center,so it is hard to say it is successful or not so far. However Naver is the most influential company in Korea internet business, so this movement will affect Korean web business dynamics in any ways.