Korean teens prefer TikTok over KakaoTalk, says survey

South Korean teens appear to prefer to do their social networking on TikTok over KakaoTalk, as short-form videos surge in popularity worldwide. 

A July survey of Korean teenagers showed they spend 1.94 billion minutes a month on TikTok, a short-form video hosting service operated by the Chinese company ByteDance. That exceeds their 1.86 billion minutes on KakaoTalk,  the top domestic mobile messenger app, according to Korean market data analysis service WiseApp. They spent 1.14 billion minutes a month on Naver, Korea’s largest online portal.

TikTok, which launched outside China in 2017, has attracted a worldwide following among Gen Z users, those born after the mid-1990s, with its lure of 15-second videos.

TikTok seized the throne in the global social media industry in the first quarter, with an average monthly usage time of 23.6 hours — topping YouTube’s average of 23.2 hours and Facebook’s 19.4 hours, according to app data analysis platform data.ai.

That caused advertisers to focus more on short-form video service providers. TikTok is expected to report ad sales of $11.6 billion this year, triple the $3.8 billion in 2021, according to Business Insider. That compared with Meta Platforms Inc. of Facebook and Instagram, which suffered a 14% decline in ad sales in the second quarter from the same period a year earlier.

“Advertisers are paying more attention to short-form platforms such as TikTok, where teens and 20-somethings are flocking,” said one industry source in Seoul.

Korea’s online platform operators have taken steps to boost the competitiveness of their short-form video services.

Naver Corp., the country's dominant online platform, runs Blog Moment, a short-form video editing service. Kakao Corp., the operator of KakaoTalk, added a feature to its Daum portal that provides short-term videos produced by 117 partners in diverse areas including news, economics, IT, health, food, entertainment and sports.

FIERCE GLOBAL COMPETITION

Leading global social media operators such as Google, operator of YouTube, and Meta have already launched their own short-form video services to compete with TikTok.

In February 2021, Meta unveiled Reels and added the service to the company’s flagship social media Facebook and Instagram. It also rolled out a feature that lets users reply to comments on posts with Reels. The feature resembles TikTok’s video reply.

Meta’s top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, mentioned Reels 47 times during the company's quarterly earnings call last month while citing Instagram 20 times, Facebook 18 times and its future growth engine Metaverse 10 times.

Last September, YouTube launched YouTube Shorts, a short-form video sharing platform that limits clips to 60 seconds.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google said last month that YouTube Shorts was regularly being viewed by over 1.5 billion signed-in users and boasted over 30 billion daily views.

Amazon.com Inc., the world’s biggest e-commerce company, is known to provide a service that explains products through short-form videos.

Write to Jeong-Soo Hwang at hjs@hankyung.com
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.