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| Koreans Love to Weigh In on Hot News |
| As pioneered by OhmyNews, portals allow users to leave their comments at the bottom of every article |
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Jean K. Min (jean)  |
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Published 2004-12-24 17:25 (KST) |
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 | |  Naver news service screen | | | ©2004 Naver.com | | News is a big deal in Korea. Every foreign correspondent working in Seoul will concur. Korea might be the hottest place in the world to report on a wide range of stories and capitalize on them.
News is also a big deal for major Korean portals. Korean portals dedicate by far the largest amount of their real estate to covering news. They buy news from all sorts of news sources including OhmyNews. Korean net users seem to love this one-stop news offering, which eliminates any need to visit multiple news sites. In this media choked world, you only have limited time to spend on each news site.
As pioneered by OhmyNews five years ago, portals allow users to leave their comments at the bottom of every article. Actually, they earn more page views out of these readers’ comments than the stories themselves. The huge amount of page views generated by the most controversial news stories is the basic staple in attracting big name advertisers for the portals.
Naver, the Korea's largest portal has recently released data showing the top 10 news articles that appeared on their new site -- according to the number of readers' comments each article generated. Among all the news provided by various Korean news sources, the ones OhmyNews provided virtually dominated every category, including politics and local news.
People tend to leave more comments when the news contains more controversial issues or touches a nerve. The Naver survey confirms that OhmyNews is a champion in this category by a comfortable margin, which in itself explains why OhmyNews has been so successful over the past five years.
Lessons: if you want to hit a home run in an on-line news venture, produce a lot of controversial stories. The exploding number of page views generated by the deluge of readers’ comments is what advertisers love to spend their money on. And be controversial in a positive way involving as many citizens as possible in the great debate over where we are heading to.
A Harvard Berkman center fellow I met in Cambridge recently stressed the importance of resurrecting the Emersonian vision of expressive society in America. I could not agree more with him on this point.
OhmyNews is not willfully producing controversial stories for money's sake, but if we can produce lots of news and make money in the course of stimulating healthy social debate, that is a good thing.
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©2004 OhmyNews
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