DIGITAL KOREA

Südkorea ist in einem rapiden Wandel. Digitale Medien werden heute schon mehr genutzt als traditionelle. Vor allem im Mobile-Bereich nimmt das Land zusehends die Rolle eines weltweiten Vorreiters ein. Der mobile Kauf von Produkten und Services ist hier schon länger Alltag: Bereits 2/3 aller Onlinekäufe werden heute via Smartphone abgewickelt. Laut Global WebIndex ist Korea hiermit bereits weltweit die Nummer Eins im M-Commerce.

In einem Land das im globalen Vergleich die höchste Internetgeschwindigkeit hat und digital alle Grenzen sprengt ist es schwer offline Schritt zu halten. Was das für traditionelle Medien bedeutet und wie sie dieser Herausforderung erfolgreich begegnen erfahren Sie im April!

Seoul, Südkorea

23. - 26. April 2017

 

Die Qualität der Teilnehmer und der externen Gesprächspartner bei den Publisher Tours ist sensationell. Die Insights sind deshalb so wertvoll, weil die meisten Gesprächspartner einem offen und ehrlich Ihre Meinungen und Erfahrungen mitteilen. In der Gruppe bietet sich darüber hinaus die unschätzbare Möglichkeit das soeben gehörte zu reflektieren und einzuordnen. Um all das zu lernen, was man in dieser einen Woche serviert bekommt, müsste man zig Kongresse besuchen.

Harald Kratel
Geschäftsführer, mlv Werbeagentur

 

WARUM SIE MIT DABEI SEIN SOLLTEN

  • Sie erhalten Einblicke in innovative Unternehmen, die Nutzerverhalten ständig im Blick haben, um digitale Geschäftsmodelle und Services nicht nur erfolgreich zu gestalten sondern auch kontinuierlich weiterzuentwickeln.
  • Sie diskutieren direkt mit dem Top Management großer Medienhäuser, Start-ups und Inkubatoren über aktuelle Herausforderungen, Trends und wie man das Traditionelle mit dem Digitalen verbindet.
  • Sie erleben hautnah die interessantesten Meinungsführer, Changeneers und Vordenker aus dem asiatischen Raum und erhalten so wertvolle Ideen und Denkanstöße für Ihre eigenen Strategien.

Zugesagte Unternehmen:

BOOKPAL:

Bookpal is one of the few mobile content sites that succeeded in persuading smartphone users to pay for mobile content either via pay per view or via subscription-based payment model. It is the favored mobile platform for aspiring young fiction writers to publish their online novels serially. Bookpal has somehow succeeded in turning initial free riders into paying customers by emulating the lessons it learned from the major subscription-based online games in South Korea: you are free to play games at beginner-level stage but if you want to join the league of advanced players, you will have to pay or buy some fancy arms. Bookpal has figured out some golden rules in the monetization of mobile content in terms of content design as well. The majority of the serial fictions it publishes are targeted at adults and storytelling is full of cliffhangers and key rules of page-turners. If you are dying to know what happened to protagonist NOW instead of waiting until the next week, pay now. This is one of the usual tactics favored by South Korean champions in mobile monetization and Bookpal is no exception. The company is currently testing the same model for mobile comics and is known to be earning additional money from online advertising as well.

CARRIE SOFT: 
Meet Carrie, the creator and presenter of Carrie and Toys, the most successful name in South Korean personal media incubated and managed by Carrie Soft. She rose to stardom in personal media by targeting preschool kids and toddlers, and creating how-to videos that are useful  for kids when they play with their toys. Called "creators" in South Korea for they usually create video content and upload their creations usually to their dedicated YouTube channels, they easily log millions of views per each video. Brightest stars in personal media are known to earn up to U$50,000 per month from the advertising revenue sharing platform facilitated by YouTube.

CONTENTA:

Contenta is an online market place that facilitates transactions of gigs between freelance writers and creators and corporate clients that are in need various content for their commercial publications such as stories, news articles, press releases, marketing consulting and even info graphics. Launched with the slogan "Create content easily at scale", Contenta  has a total of 694 registered freelance writers, editors and marketers' who have so far submitted a combined total of 567 projects for 247 corporate clients. As the submitted articles are being screened and edited by its internal staff before final delivery to the clients, the company claims it can assure quality of its content. Prices range from free to KRW5,000,000. It is possible that its future client list may include existing news media that wish to outsource editorial gigs.

D.CAMP:

Korea's first integrated entrepreneurship hub that opened in 2013 with the financial backing of Banks Foundation for Young Entrepreneurs, D.CAMP is now the country's largest and most active venture startup incubator and innovation lab with a coworking space and other key facilities including indoor and outdoor event venues. D.CAMP is networked with 2,668 companies and 9,893 professionals as of August 2016.

OHMYNEWS:

Meet OhmySchool, a 365-day brick-and-mortar journalism school for the masses started by OhmyNews, the world pioneer of citizen journalism. The whole idea seems to be designed as a public service from the outset, but it actually makes a good business sense for the company since it relies on the quality news reports compiled by citizen reporters. It is like DIY industry--when people are suddenly doing everything themselves, some huge industries will pop up to feed them with tools, education and daily supplies. Being located in the center of DMC, the visit will give the delegation a nice opportunity to have a glimpse of the sprawling media industry complex. The pioneer of citizen journalism may have passed its heyday but the site is still relevant for those who wish to tap into the power of online masses for participatory online news operation.

PODBBANG:

The arrival of rich video medium seems to have signaled the demise of radio stars but the radio has come back with vengeance in the age of smart phones in the form of podcast. Enter Podbbang, South Korea's first and largest portal for podcast contents.The portal currently hosts over 9,000 individual podcast stations that are enjoyed by some 3 millions subscribers. The main attraction of the audio-only contents fed from smart phones is that it frees the hands of listeners thereby facilitating multitasking without interrupting listeners' daily routines, says the founder Kim Dong Hee. Perhaps this multitasking possibility may be the reason why the service is overwhelmingly popular among the age group between 30s to 40s. The top podcast in the portal featuring political commentary and wry irony is believed to be attracting more news audience than the combined total of entire radio news listeners. Boosted by such outstanding performance, Podbbang has recently arrived at an agreement with SK Telecom to feed its podcast contents to the company's NUGU, an A.I. speaker similar to Amazon's Echo. The delegation will be able to check whether the audio content can revive its heyday in the new found media platform.

PUBLY:
A Kickstarter of journalism and online publishing founded by former Mackenzie consultant and aspiring journalist, Publy sells story ideas to over 6,000 paying customers based on the idea only. Once a project succeeded in crowd funding the target amount, assigned journalist or expert will go and cover the story for paying customers. Readers are even invited to offline talk shows for more in-depth and intimate discussions with the authors. Within just two years since its foundation, Publiy has succeeded in crowd funding 29 projects out of 30 proposed ideas totaling at KRW150M. The founder was convinced that there are sufficient number of willing customers ready to pay for stories provided that the story idea is compelling enough since she herself was one of such types. 

SAMSUNG:

Seoul-Suwon corridor can be compared to US Route 101 in the Bay Area, probably the busiest highway route in the country just as Freeway 101 is constantly crowded with Silicon Valley traffic commuting between San Francisco and San Jose. With its newly relocated head office complete with central R&D center and earlier production facility built around the founding days of Samsung, Suwon can be likened to Valley's San Jose. The delegation will be shown to the company's high-tech showroom that displays its latest line-up of products and some hints over future products in store as well as a tour of the corporate history museum before an one-on-one session with the company's B2B solution unit (TBC) for more in-depth discussion on the electronics giant's future business development.

SBS:

The shifting landscape of the media leadership in the wake of Seoul's broadband revolution seemed to have signaled the demise of the television medium as we know it today. However, television has made a spectacular come back to the contemporary media scene and is suddenly relevant again by internalizing the hidden desire of the audience expressed on the Net. The resurgence of the television in Korea is largely indebted to the network's prescient decision to embrace the Web instead of fighting it. From the early days of the Internet, the top three television networks have been releasing almost all of their scheduled programs on the Web as video-on-demand. The networks opened up most of their regular programs for free on the Net, but even when they charged for some popular content, they almost always offered users an option to detour the paywall in return for the participation in some co-promotion campaigns with sponsors. SBS, the top network station that has been consistently more enthusiastic than its competitors about the online content business, earned over KRW 43 billion (about US$40 mil) in revenue on the Web last year, whereas it grossed KRW 607 billion (about $570 mil) from its television arm. The delegation will visit SBS Content Hub located in DMC which oversees the station's collaborative programming effort across old and new media platforms.

SHAREHOWS:
Can a news site dedicated solely to introducing how-to videos make a sound business model? Bae Yun Shik believed so and started ShareHows, a know-how sharing media active in YouTube and Facebook that have so far succeeded in attracting 2.3million followers spread across multiple social networks. 16 Best Bathroom lifehacks, its best-performing video so far, has been shared over 3 million times with a combined view totaling at over 120 millions. Such outstanding performance was possible thanks to their keen understanding of the tastes of online readers and of what makes a specific content worth sharing online and pushing it up to the viral stratosphere. What makes this extraordinary model even more interesting is how they made this site sustainable financially: they scouted scores of business partners who are happen to be experts in their respective fields. Best travel know-hows shall be created by their tourism business partner whereas bathroom life hacks was told sponsored by wireless carrier SK Telecom. Such seamless blending of know-hows and brand exposure is so amusing to watch that nobody would complain about the uncomfortable coexistence often seen in so-called native ads or advertorials. It is simply fun to watch and share. The key here is to come up with entertaining and useful content without working too hard as to make you look desperate for attention.

TOPTOON / BOMTOON:

Essentially a Bookpal in online comics a.k.a. Webtoon in South Korea, Top Comics is one of the brightest stars in South Korean Webtoon business with some ten million paying customers accumulated as of August 2015. The company runs two service brands depending on their target audience: TopToon tailored for males readers and BomToon for female readers. Their monetization tactics is based on the time-version model: if you want to know what happened to him/her NOW instead of waiting one more week, pay now. It is also full of adult-only content: adult content seems to be the most promising content for now in terms of monetizing mobile content in South Korea. The company's combined revenue has added up to KRW32billions as of March 2016. Find out for yourself if the same content sales model can also be applied to European smartphone users.

More on Webtoon: Asia's (World's) largest comic market is Japan. Japan leads the global comic market in every indicator known to us including number of printed comic books available anytime and anywhere. When it comes to Webtoon (Web cartoons), though, South Korea is leading the show. Top portal sites update hundreds of Webtoon everyday, and those stories proven popular among Korean online users are often turned into a big-budget movie. In fact, a Webtoon-turned-film was a box office champion early this year in the local multiplex theaters. The author of the Webtoon had published weekly installments of his work in the No. 2 portal--Daum.

Whereas Japan's Webtoon usually appear in the form of simple e-book converted directly from their paper counterpart, South Korean Webtoon are targeted solely at online audience from the very start with matching story telling techniques that fully capitalize on the unique opportunities online space can offer: skyscraper panes proposed by Scott McCloud, hyperlink jump, flash animation, sound effects and even musical scores written exclusively for Webtoon. In short, they are optimized for the full potential of the Web sphere and for the smartphone screen.

On top of the unique artistic frontier South Korean Webtoon artists have exploited so far, equally interesting experiments are being conducted on the business front as well: partial micro payment and Apple Appstore-style revenue sharing model, time versioning (dying to know next week's story in advance? Click this pay site), Google Ad sense-style click-through advertisement, sales of Webtoon print copies and even product (and brand) placement. Industry observers estimate that combined total revenue of South Korean web toons would grow to U$2billion by 2017.

Fakten zu Südkorea

  • 94% Smartphone ownership (global average 88%)
  • Worldwide leader in m-commerce
  • Weekly news reach per source: 86 Percent Online, 71 Percent TV
  • 60% (approx. 5.30 h) of daily media time spent online
  • Home of Samsung, World's largest seller of smart phones and semi-conductors
  • Apple's iPhone is currently the No.2 smartphone in terms of quarterly global sales
  • South Korea earns over 30% of its GDP from the sales of ICT products and services as of 2015
  • South Korea's broadband penetration is world's No.2 after Japan
  • 69.4% of homes having subscribed for mostly fiber-based broadband Internet according to Statista
  • Wireless broadband Internet penetration in South Korea is 100.6% according to OECD, some two times higher than OECD average (54.3%)
  • 43.9% of South Koreans singled out smartphone as their most important media platform according to a survey in 2014
  • TV still remained the No. 1 media of choice with 44.3%
  • 87.2% of South Koreans read news on portals such as Naver and DAUM according to a survey in 2013 by DMC Media
  • More people read news on mobile devices (51.4%) than on PC's (45.1%)
  • 41.7% of the questioned singled out headline as the primary reason they clicked any news whereas only 17.9% answered news brand
  • Naver, the country's No.1 portal, earned KRW1.4 trillion in advertising revenue in the first half of 2016, two times higher than the combined advertising revenue in the same period of all three terrestrial TV stations--KBS, MBC and SBS

Um einen exklusiven und intensiven Austausch mit den Gesprächspartnern vor Ort zu garantieren, sind die Teilnehmerplätze streng limitiert!

Für weitere Informationen oder eine unverbindliche Reservierung kontaktieren Sie bitte:

Anett Breitsprecher
VDZ Akademie
Haus der Presse
Markgrafenstraße 15
10969 Berlin
Telefon: 030.72 62 98 – 158
Telefax: 030.72 62 98 – 114
E-Mail: a.breitsprecher@vdz-akademie.de