You might not find out what kind of web service now lead the internet industry in Korea. It's an very unusual situation. Since 1996 from the begining of internet industry in Korea, there had been a leading sector. For example,e-mail the late 1990s,the search the early 2000s,community 2002-2003,mini homepage 2004-2005,UGC(User Generated Contents) site 2006,blog 2007-2008. But there is no growth engine for internet industry this year.
According to rankey.com(the internet research company), the traffic of all sectors of web service has been declining. It had never happened before. I mean all sectors of web service include portal,SNS,community,UGC site,blog,open market,game portal.
You may try to point out the micro blog as twitter,Metoday(it's a Kroean style twitter operated by NHN). But the statistics for the micro blog betrayed your expectation. The unique visitor(UV) of the micro blog was 1.50 million on July,and 2.60 million on August.However,the UV of micro blog plummeted to 2.00 million on September. This statistics are also based on the research of rankey.com.
Why do you think there is no growth engine for INternet industry in Korea? Blog can not play the leading role in the development of web service.Neither do UGC and community service.
Someone said it's due to the regulation of Korea Government. From my perspective,however,it's maily because of lack of innovation in this industry.
You may remember Neowiz's Avatar(1999),Naver's complex search(2000),Naver's Knowledge search(2002),Cyworld's mini hompi(2003). They are definitely creative services.And we can call them the web service of the innovation. But it's gone since 2004. For five years, there has been no innovative services in internet industry.
The Korea web industry's leading company had just imported or copied innovative services from oversea's companies. Why? What happen? I will show you the reason of this phenomenon in my next posting.
