Brief Overview of Korean SNS and SNG Market

The current Korean SNS industry could be described as a monopoly of Nate AppStore.  Nate AppStore utilizes their already established and successful SNS called “Cyworld” to accelerate their growth.  With Cyworld’s pool of 21 million users, Nate AppStore has a comparative advantage over other competitors such as Naver and Daum when it comes to securing potential users.  The biggest reason behind this is because Nate started as a SNS while Naver and Daum started as a search engine or a portal site.

Out of 21 million user pool Nate has, only 13% or 2.7 million users have used Nate AppStore so far and new users are steadily increasing everyday.  49 developers have published 99 applications as of 14 July 2010, but excluding all the individual or small studios, about 10 major developers exist in the market.  Considering the size and growth of consumers, the current market has an excess demand.

Nate’s major competitor Naver and Daum are the relative newcomers in the SNS industry yet their potential should not be neglected.  Naver, for example, is the no.1 portal site and has accumulated 18 million bloggers, 6 million community clubs, and 1 million Me2Day(Korean version of Twitter).  With its pool of users, Naver is planning to launch a SNG platform (Open Social) by the end of 2010.  Naver’s app store would definitely rise as the next “blue ocean” for many SNG developers worldwide.