Naver, Kakao bet on open community platform to woo young users

[Sources : Naver, Kakao]

Naver Corp. and Kakao Corp., the two largest platform companies in South Korea, are readying to launch open, decentralized social networking platforms to appeal to teens and young adults that opt for global platform giant Instagram where they are willing to share views and interest with strangers.

According to data from NHN Data, only 63 percent of Android users in the Z-generation, who were born between 1990 and 2010, installed Naver and KakaoTalk apps, respectively, compared to older age groups whose figure reaches around 90 percent. The most installed app in the younger generation was Instagram as opposed to older generations.

In response to tepid interest from young people, Naver and Kakao are preparing to launch open community platforms, which are highly preferred by young people, to increase their presence among those in their 20s.

Naver plans to expand the coverage of the Naver (N) Community tab, which was newly launched in September last year, from sports to dramas at the end of this month. The strategy is to develop an open community chat platform where people can form different channels for different dramas to share their views. Last year, Naver operated a sports open talk service during the World Cup, and at that time, close to 1,400 open talks were created in the soccer category.

Naver Open Talk [Source : Naver]

Naver is currently expanding and operating Open Talk and users can participate by searching for related keywords in their interests such as MBTI, Japan travel, League of Legends, and today‘s fortune. In the future, it plans to expand the coverage to include weather and employment topics.

Kakao also plans to captivate the Z-generation with a two-track strategy through service development of existing KakaoTalk, Korea’s dominant chat app used by nearly all Koreans in the country, and preparations for the launch of its new business, Open Community (Open Link), in the first half of this year.

Open Link, a global version of the existing KakaoTalk open chat, supports multilingual languages and claims to be a more powerful community platform in sync with Kakao’s major services such as music and webtoons.

In the long term, it can also be connected to Kakao’s future open metaverse platform due to be launched in the future. Kakao recently decided to add a content authoring tool to KakaoTalk’s profile, while seeking a short form feature.