KakaoTalk has more users than Naver, says a June analysis

It has been analyzed in a report that South Korean mobile application KakaoTalk surpassed Korea’s largest portal Naver in the number of users and usage time in June.

Big data analytics business IGAworks on Thursday carried out an analysis of Android-run mobile devices that are used in South Korea to study MAU, Monthly Active User, using its data analytics program “Mobile Index” last month. It turns out that KakaoGroup’s flagship application KakaoTalk has around 35.59 million users while 30.16 million people surf the web on Naver. The monthly average usage time for KakaoTalk and Naver adds up to 11.7 hours and 10.2 hours, respectively. The users spent a total of 24.6 days and 18.6 days on KakaoTalk and Naver, respectively.

The study released that Naver’s messenger application Line has 1.51 million users, a far smaller number than KakaoTalk’s. Meanwhile, Daum, which is KakaoTalk’s web portal application, turned out to have 8.19 million users, falling behind Naver.

Around 16.92 million people use Naver’s social media platform Band while 9.96 million and 5.1 million have their accounts on KakaoStory and Naver Cafe. Naver Map and KakaoMap retain 11.12 million and 5.3 million users, respectively.

Around 5.91 million users read webtoons or a type of digital comic and webnovel content on Naver Webtoon and Naver Series while 4.08 million are on KakaoPage and Daum Webtoon.


Gun-Huk Lee gun@donga.com