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Korea in the digital vanguard

by Shashank Tripathi, Korea

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Video is Hot, UCC is Not

May 2, 2007 12:23

User Created Content (famously equivocated as User Generated Content, or Consumer Generated Media) was the Big Thing not too long ago. Every marketer and his agency were scrambling for ways to build campaigns that promoted UCC. It was a popular search term as the Web 2.0 (sic) generation got excited.

Naver launched Jeeseeg shopping (smart shopping). Daum one-upped with its own online shopping mall that allowed users to submit product feedback (um, reviews?) and feedback on that feedback. The Government soon jumped in and came up with a package of policies geared toward encouraging the quality of UCC.

However, according to local information trackers Rankey and Korean Click, Net visits and pageviews of Daum Communication's UCC service TV Pot have been on a steady increase for the past four months since the service launch. In fact, the three biggest video service providers took the lead in the UCC movie service in the 1st quarter. Pandora TV, MNCast of SM Online, and Daum TV Pot kept the high ranks with constantly increased users, while Naver Play, Freechal Q and Mgoon Media are following them. Especially, it is considered that the market will see a marked increase if NHN starts the aggressive marketing with Naver.com where a lot of users visit for UCC movies.

According to Rankey.com, the daily visitors to Pandora TV increased from 500,000 to 750,000, while Daum TV Pot from around 400,000 to over 500,000. MNCast of SM Online also achieved 500,000 for daily visitors from 380,000 in last October. Korean Click showed a similar result in the pageviews of Web sites. Pandora TV, MNCast and Daum TV Pot ranked top three over Naver Play, Freechal Q and Mgoon Media. Pandora TV achieved 280 million pageviews, while MNCast scored 170 million and Daum TV Pot 90 million. Freechal Q and Naver Play showed 35 million and 28 million pageviews, respectively.

Great, but how about the actual UCC bits?

There's bad news there. The UCC bits of all these lead players were found to have little impact on users' loyalty to the overall portal site. Which is telling. It suggests that UCC may well be a catchphrase as it is the TV video offerings that ultimately drive customers to visit and revisit their favorite Web sites. The better the "My Bookmarked Favorite Videos" section is administered, the more loyal an audience will be. It would be interesting to have Rankey and Korean Clicks, or perhaps the video portals themselves, report on the number of user-created videos versus commercial television videos that are most frequently "favorited". It's time the industry moved on from reporting meaningless volume numbers such as pageviews!

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About Shashank Tripathi

Shashank Tripathi, nicknamed Shanx, believes that a rocking hammock, a good book, and a tall glass of strawberry milkshake are the way to save the planet. But that does not fill all the hours in a day, so he cuts his teeth on digital advertising and media, spending a good part of his life expressing opinions as though they were going out of fashion, or drawing boxes that connect to each other with shiny black arrows. Occasionally, he has also been accused of poetry.

Locus: Based in Singapore, but a devout jetrosexual.
Focus: Media, Advertising, Ubicomp, All things Digital.
Other: LinkedIn, Facebook