KoreaCrunch

Daum, the #2 largest Internet portal in Korea gains 20% share in Korean search market. As you know, Korea is one of Google failed countries against local search engine. Google is still behind others in Russia, the Czech Republic, Korea, China and Japan. Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Baidu and Yahoo! Japan are all the leaders in each of these nations respectively.

Naver has still dominated 75% market share and reached 10 times profit compared with Daum’s. According to Comscore’s report, NHN was also #5 search engine in the world.

But, Daum caught up Naver slowly and maintained 20% share from August, 2008. On the contrary, Yahoo! Korea and Empas.com(a branch of Cyworld) was slowly down. Google Korea still struggled in Korean market with below 1.5% share.

Overtaking market share by #2 player is very hard in online business in general. But, Daum had some benefit from Korean political situation by focusing on online debate service named “Agora”. Internet users enjoyed political debates rather than in Naver.com for issues such as US beef and Minerva scandal.

In addtion, Daum’s efforts to lead user-participation has been aggressive rather than Naver’s. It acquired a Korean encyclopedia and its license and donated it to Wikipedia. Some users and Daum have been proceeding with Knowledge Sharing Project since then.