Kakao picks short-form feeds as its future to woo younger generation

KakaoTalk, South Korea’s dominant messaging app, will make massive changes to appeal to young generation users in their 10s and 20s by adopting “short-form” features to the user profile and enriching the messenger with community sharing and searching functions put in a pack.

The app operator Kakao Corp. is now working on these upgrades as a next-year project, according to sources on Thursday.

This move comes after the 12-year-old popular app suffered a significant drop in reliability and user base as its major services were shut down by a data center fire in early October.

During a recent meeting where employees were briefed about business plans for next year, Kakao CEO Hong Eun-taek emphasized that regaining trust from users can only be realized through a set of powerful services, according to people familiar with the situation.

Starting next month, the messenger’s profile setting is expected to undergo a major overhaul with an addition of vertical scrolling versus the current profile that can be swiped left and right. Kakao Brain’s AI artist Karlo may be added as a Talk profile content production tool to help users enrich their profile.

On Wednesday, Kakao added a new “empathy sticker” feature to allow users to communicate with friends though the profile. Users can use the sticker to express his or her emotions in the profile and friends can show their empathy by pressing the sticker. As only the profile owner can view the names of sticker senders, this is similar to Instagram’s short-form Story format.

Market watchers said that such a move by Kakao hints at its transformation into a short-form platform beyond a simple user interface change. Kakao will induce users to produce short-form content by continuing to add content production tools and introducing vertical scrolling for the layout, they expected.

With more short-form platform features that are gaining in popularity among younger generation, KakaoTalk is seeking to regain its reputation as Korea’s unrivaled messenger app and transform into a next-generation portal platform.