South Korean Video Ad Market Sees Increased Competition

10 September 2015. Competition in the online video advertising market is hotting up in South Korea. YouTube is set to launch its Google Preferred service in the country on 1st October, which allows advertisers to buy advertising inventory with the top 5% YouTube channels in advance. This benefits both the channel owner, who sees an increase in revenue, and the advertiser, who sees an increase in brand awareness and ad recall. YouTube will face stiff competition from local search engine giants Naver and Kakao, however. Naver is to launch a beta version of its video platform Play League on 5th October, which will operate in a very similar way to YouTube and will be available to anyone with a Naver ID. Naver also operates an online entertainment channel called Naver TVCast. Its arch-rival Kakao also runs an online entertainment channel, Kakao TV, which currently has around 40 million subscribers.
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