The Korea Times
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
By Kim Tong-hyung
The inevitable became a reality Tuesday when SK Communications confirmed it would be shutting down Empas (www.empas.com) in March, consolidating it with its flagship portal, Nate (www.nate.com).
The company is hoping to leverage the popularity of Empas' search services to drive more traffic to Nate (www.nate.com), which has been struggling to compete against the strengthening duopoly of Naver (www.naver.com) and Daum (www.daum.net).
"By creating synergy between our core services, we will get a new opportunity to step up as a leading company," said Joo Hyeong-cheol, chief executive of SK Communications, which is a unit of mobile telephony carrier SK Telecom.
"The new portal will serve as a platform for not only the Web services of SK Communications, but for all the content provided by the companies within the SK Group. Adapting to the trend of convergence was a big concern for us, as we will retool our search, e-mail and news services attentively with the new environment," he said.
Empas subscribers will be automatically directed to the new Nate site starting March 1, the company said.
Users of Empas' blog services will be relocated to SK Communications' Cyworld (www.cyworld.com) social networking services or Elgoos (www.egloos.com) blog services, while the company has yet to decide how to move users of Empas' "Cafe" Web communities.
Since its establishment in 1996, Empas garnered a reputation for its innovative search services, including its "natural language search," introduced in 1999, that allowed users to use sentences, instead of just keywords, in searches.
However, the company eventually weltered under the dominance of Naver, which now controls more than 70 percent of all search queries thanks to its "knowledge service" services that allows users to submit questions and edit answers.
After acquiring Empas in 2006, SK Communications initially said it would operate the portal separately from Nate, although a consolidation looked like a natural conclusion, with Nate struggling to compete with Naver.
The recent departure of Park Seok-bong, the founder of Empas and chief strategy officer under Joo, was the clearest indication that SK Communications was giving up Empas as a brand.
It remains to be seen whether the melding of Empas into Nate's platform will have an immediate impact on traffic. According to Internet research site Korean Click, Nate and Empas combined to gather around 37 million visitors last month, which is larger than Naver's 31 million-plus visitors.
SK Communications is clearly focused on strengthening its search traffic. The company said the revamped Nate site will provide content from the database of Cyworld, which has more than 20 million subscribers, in its search results.