Want to promote your company in Korea? Worldwide, there are only three countries where the default search engine is not Google. Those are Russia, China and Korea. The search engine (or more appropriately, portal) most used in Korea is called Naver (owned by NHN). Korea’s second largest portal is Daum, which merged with Kakao (known for the mobile messaging application KakaoTalk). Many people use them daily for shopping, to read emails, news, find info about real estate and browse their social networks (Naver or Daum Cafe).

To start a digital marketing campaign, I will give an overview of advertising in both of them. This article consists of three parts:

1. What are the most used websites / apps in Korea
2. Background info about Naver and Kakao
3. A comparison of Naver and Daum pay per click (PPC) online advertising systems

For more info about advertising in Korea / Naver, go to eBook and download the eBook and media kits. Follow the link for Naver SEO.

So, what are the most popular websites in Korea (November / December 2017)? According to three different sources, we get three different results! (Follow the link for an earlier blog post about Korean search portals.)

Note: Unlike Alexa, Similarweb does not add statistics from subdomains (like news.naver.com, sports.naver.com, shopping.naver.com etc.) to top-level domain Naver.com. Alexa, Similarweb and Nielsen Koreanclick all make the distinction between google.com and google.co.kr.

Below are the unique visitor numbers from Nielsen Koreaclick, data is from November 2018, in tens of thousands:

Note: “Google” traffic is from both google.com and google.co.kr. In a chart, the data looks like this:

According to Nielsen Koreaclick, the three most popular websites in Korea for searching the web are Naver, Daum and Google. Google may have more unique visitors, people spend more time on Daum and it has more pageviews. (The demographic that uses Daum is older.) Naver users do more queries, though, as Koreans see it as a good way to pass time.

“Advertising accounted for 73% of Naver’s total sales” for Q2 in 2017. It saw a “solid gain” in mobile ad revenue. It takes almost 20% of all e-commerce revenue in Korea, thanks to the diversity of its shopping channels and user friendly online payment system (Naver Pay). In Q3 this year growth in overseas sales (mostly by messaging app Line and mobile ads) increased earnings for Naver.

For Kakao, 36.5% of its sales consists of ad revenue (534 billion won, 2016). Mobile games and music content are its fastest growing business units (702 billion won). Kakao also owns one of Korea’s few Internet only banks (Kakao Bank) and a cryptocurrency exchange (Upbit). (Follow the link for a more detailed profile of Kakao.) Both Naver TV and Kakao TV are making efforts to capture market share from YouTube in Korea. Through YouTube, Google gets a lot of ad revenue while Naver leads in PC and mobile ads.

There are already many articles about Naver PPC (official name: Search Ad) and the differences between Google AdWords and Naver Search Ad. Therefore, this blog post is about the differences between Naver and Daum PPC. One clear distinction between Google on the one hand and Naver and Daum on the other hand is that Naver and Daum only have exact match type. There is broad (modifier) or phrase match. So you will have to find all exact match long tail keywords to run a successful PPC campaign.

The most eye-catching feature of advertising in both Naver and Daum is “brand search” (브랜드 검색). Instead of just text, it also shows images. While it gives your brand a lot of legitimacy, there are some requirements to be eligible for brand search. The minimum budget for brand search is 500,000 won, roughly U$D 500.