Korea Times
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
By Kim Tae-gyu
Tens of millions of people still frequent Cyworld, South Korea's top social-networking site, but they spend less and less time on the popular Internet site.
KoreanClick, the domestic online consultant company, Wednesday said the number of monthly visitors to Cyworld is almost unchanged at slightly more than 20 million since April 2005.
But their average time on the site declined after peaking at six hours and 48 minutes in July 2004. The figure tumbled to five hours and 28 minutes in July 2005, four hours and 49 minutes in June 2006 and four hours and 21 minutes last month.
"The falling length of visiting time indicates that Cyworld users spend less time at the community site. It's bad news for Cyworld," said Shim Jun-ho, an analyst at Goodmorning Shinhan Securities.
"SK Communications, which operates Cyworld, may worry about the plunging median use time because it can signal a loss of loyal customers," Shim said.
As a rough equivalent to MySpace of the United States, Cyworld is Korea's foremost online community that boasts of more than 20 million subscribers.
Unlike a blog, short for Web log, Cyworld uniquely interconnects personal homepages, prompting users to form a network with their friends and colleagues.
Cyworld became a "must have" site for young Koreans, who typically spent several hours a day decorating their homepages or scrolling through others' to forge new networks.
However, young Web junkies recently started shifting their interest to other services including video footage created by ordinary people from the time-consuming works at Cyworld.
"It is really hard for Internet companies to regain support of users once they lose popularity. SK Communications can face problems in this sense," Shim said.
SK Communications flatly denied that it has passed its heyday.
"The monthly use time of over four hours is still unparalleled for social-networking sites. It is wrong to say that Cyworld is over the hill," SK spokesman Myung Sam said.
"We think Cyworld clients use the services reasonably now while they were too obsessed with them in the past," he said.
Myung added its upgrade services, called Cyworld 2 that will debut later this month, will provide a new momentum for the Seoul-based company.