Explainer: Why Korea's teens are abandoning KakaoTalk for Instagram

Korean teens are gravitating toward Instagram, leaving KakaoTalk due to its limited social features. The exodus of young users to the U.S. social platform signifies a potential shift in Korea's social media paradigm.

Instagram app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

KakaoTalk has been so dominant in Korea that the domestic messaging app has toppled even Big Tech platforms Instagram and Facebook in terms of monthly active users (MAUs) and connected time since its 2010 release.

But though the app currently counts 48.94 million MAUs in its home country, data shows that it may be inching past its prime among Korea's younger generation, which is veering away from text-based communication and toward Meta's services, which offer not only messaging features but also the ability to post photos and consume short-form video.

KakaoTalk was Korea's No. 1 app as recently as November 2020, counting 42.23 million MAUs that month while Instagram, in sixth place, had only 14.2 million, according to market tracker Wiseapp, Retail, Goods. It was second only to YouTube in total engagement time: Koreans spent a total of 26.5 billion minutes on the app during the month and only 4.7 billion on Instagram. Korean teenagers used Kakao's app more often than they did Meta's in 2022, spending an average of 1.86 billion minutes per month on the former and 1.41 billion on the latter. But the tide has turned sharply in the past two years. Koreans in their teens and 20s spent more time on Instagram, on average, than they did on KakaoTalk this August, according to Wiseapp, Retail, Goods. The former group spent about 6.1 billion minutes on Instagram that month, 126 percent more time than they did on KakaoTalk, while the latter spent 7.5 billion minutes on Meta's app and 6.5 billion on Kakao's.

Instagram's MAUs broke 25.54 million in July, a 14 percent on-year increase and a 72 percent surge from five years ago.

The exodus of young users to the U.S. social platform signifies a potential shift in Korea's social media paradigm. The country's homegrown platforms such as Naver and Kakao have constituted a dominant part of people's online world — perhaps until now. The Korea JoongAng Daily asked young Koreans about their exodus from KakaoTalk and growing love for Instagram.

What has made KakaoTalk less appealing to young people? Though KakaoTalk markets itself as a social media platform, it is almost entirely used for its messaging function.

The company has made a few, rather unsuccessful, attempts to stimulate interaction in other ways, including the rollout of a “pung” feature meant to compete with Instagram's Stories that failed to reach its target audience.

The app of Korean digital lender Kakao Bank is seen on a mobile phone in this illustration picture taken August 6, 2021. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

“I have never seen a single person on my 200-300 Kakao friends list use it,” one online commenter wrote of the feature. “Kakao clearly thought they could take a bite of the Instagram Stories crowd, somehow not realizing that crowd chooses to use Instagram precisely because it's not Kakao.”

A college first year students, who requested that he be identified by his surname of Park, said that his group of friends uses KakaoTalk and Instagram for strictly separate functions.

“We go to KakaoTalk when it's related to something 'official,' like school events or team projects,” Park told the Korea JoongAng Daily. “But when it's time to mingle, we ask about Instagram handles. I think people around me, nowadays, ask more about the handles rather than our phone numbers.”

Kakao did, perhaps, foresee this trend, as it announced plans to “renovate” KakaoTalk into the full-fledged social media platform “KakaoTalk 2.0" in late 2022. The messaging giant added features, including profile stickers and Facebook-esque “likes,” but failed to effectively emulate Instagram's ecosystem.

How dominant is Instagram among young people? In a word: very.

When asked which social media network they use most often in 2023, 48.6 percent of Koreans answered Instagram, according to a Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI) survey of 9,757 individuals and 4,077 households. Just 16.7 percent preferred Facebook, 13.1 percent Naver Band, 10.2 percent KakaoStory and 7.7 percent X, formerly known as Twitter. On the same survey in 2021, Instagram accounted for only 31.5 percent of the total. The app has an even tighter hold on Korea's young people, with 66.9 percent of the country's Gen Z users and 57 percent of millennials selecting it as their top app.

YouTube is the only app claiming higher screen time across age group — an unsurprising statistic given the fact that YouTube videos tend to be much longer than those on Instagram. The August Wiseapp survey found that YouTube was the most heavily utilized app across all generations from teens to those in their 60s. YouTube had more than double the average monthly engagement time among teens, and more than three-fold screen time among those in their 20s and 30s.

“As much as I consume Reels, I also spend time watching YouTube,” said 23-year-old Lee Chang-ha. “It's a way to kill time.”

Is KakaoTalk the only app losing young users? Instagram's sister app Facebook is also rapidly losing its foothold in the country, especially among youngsters.

Facebook's number of Korean monthly active users plunged 32 percent between 2019 and 2024, numbering just 8.4 million this February. The departure of those in their teens and 20s was particularly dire, with the figure for teens shrinking by 56 percent to 1.01 million and those in their 20s by 49 percent to 1.73 million.

Twenty-three-year-old Son Jung-hoon recently lost interest in Facebook due to its proliferation of promoted content.

“I mean, I still use Facebook, but not a lot of my acquaintances are on the platform, and so much ad content makes me want to stay off the app.”

Another 24-year-old, who asked to be known by her surname of Kim, identified Facebook as “a platform for older people.”

“I know that it was once the most popular platform, even more so than Instagram,” she said. “But now, isn't Facebook a platform where adults with certain political backgrounds go to as a speaker for their points of view? I think my friends hardly utilize the platform anymore.”

Given the great amount of time spent on Instagram, are there efforts underway curb teenage social media use? Yes — around the world.

Lawmaker Cho Jung-hun proposed a bill on Aug. 13 to revise the Act on the Promotion of Information Security Industry, which includes a provision to set daily usage limits on social media for those younger than 16 and require parental consent for algorithms that may induce addiction.

The KISDI report found that younger the users were, the more time they spent on social media. Gen Z spent an average of 55 minutes per day on social media, more than twice the 22 minutes that baby boomers accounted for.

Gen Z, which includes those born from 1997 to 2012 as defined by Pew Research Center, is the generation most active on social media — not only in Korea, but also worldwide — and overseas governments, including those of the United States, the European Union, Australia, France, China and Taiwan are making moves to limit their social media experience.

Korea has also been showing moves to follow the global compliance.

A survey conducted by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Information Society Agency (NIA) in 2023 classified 40.1 percent of Korean teenagers as exhibiting “smartphone overdependence.” Notably, 23 percent of respondents who viewed short-form content reported having difficulty controlling their viewing habits, with the figure rising to 37 percent among teenagers.

Choi Yoon-jung, parental president of Seoul Changchon Elementary School, pointed to Instagram as the primary reason for her daughter’s smartphone addiction.

“She was fine until elementary school, but all of it changed when she entered middle school — she suddenly wanted an iPhone,” Choi said during a discussion of teenage smartphone addiction held at the National Assembly on Aug. 13. From that period on, Choi said, her daughter has kept herself locked in her room with her smartphone, to the point that she felt the need to confiscate the device.

When Choi checked her daughter’s phone, Instagram was all over the usage logs.

Choi strongly requested that the government to step up, emphasizing that parents like herself were having difficulty exercising control over their offspring’s social media experience.

The side effects of such apps, especially for teens that grapple with depression, addiction, anxiety and other mental health issues are concerning parents globally. Meta has cited such conditions as the reasoning behind its “Teen Accounts” policy, announced Tuesday, which automatically restricts the Instagram profiles of users younger than 18.

Teen Accounts are private by default, meaning only approved followers can see their posted content and send them messages. Additional settings will include a sleep mode that turns off notifications and sends automated replies to DMs from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., a censored algorithm that does not recommend provocative content and pop-up notifications reminding teens to take breaks after 60 minutes of use.

The measures began rolling out gradually to teens in the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada starting Tuesday and are expected to arrive in Korea next January.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]