Naver digital services generate $140bn in welfare value each year: Study

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The digital services provided by South Korean platform giant Naver Corp. generate an estimated 200 trillion won ($139.67 billion) in consumer welfare value each year, a study showed on Monday.

According to Naver and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the KAIST Digital Future Innovation Research Center published a report titled, “Digital Economy Report 2025: Consumer Welfare Created by Naver,” which analyzed the economic value and consumer welfare benefits of digital platforms used by the public for free.

The research team measured the value consumers derive from major digital services by applying experimental economics techniques to a sample of 6,000 Korean respondents.

Participants were asked whether they would give up using certain digital services for a year in exchange for compensation ranging from 100,000 won ($69.83) to 10 million won, depending on the category.

This approach, developed by Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University, and colleagues in 2019, was applied to Korea’s digital ecosystem for the first time to estimate the welfare value of the nation’s digital economy.

The study found that 10 major Naver services create an average annual economic value of 14.75 million won per person.

Among them, search and map services accounted for most of the value, with search contributing 7.04 million won and maps 4.28 million won.

The researchers noted that Naver’s search and maps function as the fundamental infrastructure and core services of the domestic digital ecosystem.

Other services also provided significant value, including: 1.39 million won for email; 970,000 won for shopping; 450,000 won for social networking services (SNS); 70,000 won for video streaming; and 560,000 won for other services such as translation, news, webtoons, digital payments.

Overall, Naver’s contribution was estimated to account for about half of the total welfare value derived from these services, the report said.

The total consumer surplus value for digital goods provided by Naver amounted to: 222.7 trillion won for search; 131.5 trillion won for maps; and 43 trillion won for email.

When combining all Naver services - including Search, Maps, Mail, Shopping, Blog, Café, Knowledge iN, News, Papago, TV, Clip, Chzzk (streaming), Pay, Webtoon, and Series - the total consumer welfare reached 447 trillion won.

However, the researchers cautioned that simply adding up the welfare values of individual services could lead to overestimation.

They said that a more reasonable lower-bound estimate of Naver’s total annual consumer welfare would be around 222 trillion won, based on the welfare value generated by its core search engine services.

“Policies on digital platforms should be designed to enhance the welfare of society as a whole, taking into account their potential impact on users,” noted Ahn Jae-hyeon, head of the KAIST Digital Innovation Research Center. “In particular, for digital essentials such as search engines and maps, which have far-reaching social effects, policymakers must take an especially cautious and balanced approach.”