S. Koreans' time on YouTube up 20% in Sept.: data

South Koreans are estimated to have spent over 50 billion minutes on YouTube in September amid the pandemic, a 20 percent jump from a year earlier, data showed Tuesday.

Mobile app tracker Wiseapp said the video streaming application was the application most used by the country's 33.7 million Android smartphone users in September at 53.1 billion minutes, compared with 44.3 billion minutes spent on the app the previous year.

Wiseapp said the pandemic likely led to increased use of mobile applications, as more people stayed home in line with social distancing measures.

KakaoTalk, the country's top messenger app, was a distant second at 22.5 billion minutes, up 5 percent from the previous year, followed by Naver, South Korea's largest internet portal, at 17.2 billion minutes, rising 8 percent over the same period.

Out of the 10 most-used apps, Netflix Inc.'s application exhibited the highest on-year growth at 159 percent, according to Wiseapp data.

South Koreans are estimated to have spent around 2.1 billion minutes on Netflix in September, compared with 800 million minutes the previous year.

The app tracker said its data was based on 60,000 Android smartphone users in the country. (Yonhap)