Daum CEO (source: Yeonhap News)
In Korea, leading newspaper companies have provided full content to the so-called portals, such as Naver or Daum, which are the de facto destination site for many Korean netizens. As a result, Korean online users didn't have to browse through different newspaper sites - they could just visit their portal of choice and consume all the news from different media in a "one-stop shopping" manner.
The problem was, as the news from various media got represented in a uniform way following the portals' look and feel, users perceived the news was actually coming from the portals and paid less attention to where that news came from. This led to less traffic to the original newspaper sites.
By contrast, Yahoo News mostly aggregate news from AP, AFP, Reuter - the so-called "news agencies" whose business model itself is news content syndication; Google News displays only the links to the original sites, and by clicking those links, users go to the original news sources.
As such, there have been great tensions between the original news content providers and the portals - And it looks like Daum is taking one step back now.
Under the new announcement, Daum will share ad revenue from its news pages with the original news content providers; And perhaps more importantly, will also provide an "outlink" option, where only the links to the original news (and maybe partial content) get displayed on Daum's news page, as opposed to the full content.
So how is news content consumed online in other Asian countries? Do users mostly visit (or subscribe to) each and every news site, or do users mostly check out aggregation sites, such as the portals? If the latter, how do original content providers and the channel owners (eg. portals) resolve the possible conflicts?
TAG Daum, News
