YouTube trumps KakaoTalk, Naver as South Korea’s longest-used app

YouTube has emerged as South Korea’s star mobile app, with Korean smartphone users spending the longest amount of time on the video-sharing platform than any other app.

Seoul-based app analytics firm WiseApp on Wednesday released data that counted and compared the minutes Korean Android users spend on four top-used apps here: KakaoTalk, YouTube, Naver and Facebook.

WiseApp monitored the monthly app usage time of 3,712 Android users above the age of 10 over two years, from March 2016 to February 2018.

Among the four apps, users spent the longest time on YouTube. They spent a total of 25.7 billion minutes on the app in February 2018, which far outruns the total time spent on the other three apps during the period.

During the same month, users spent just 17.9 billion minutes on KakaoTalk, 12.6 billion minutes on Naver and 4.2 billion minutes on Facebook.

YouTube was also the only app among the four to see a significant jump in its total usage time over the past two years.

The amount of time users spent on YouTube jumped more than threefold from just 7.9 billion minutes in March 2016 to 25.7 billion minutes in February 2018.

Though behind Facebook, Naver also saw an increase in time spent on its app from 10.9 billion minutes to 12.6 billion minutes during the same period.

In the case of KakaoTalk and Facebook, their app usage times decreased during the two-year period: KakaoTalk from 18.9 billion minutes to 17.9 billion minutes and Facebook from 4.9 billion minutes to 4.2 billion minutes.

In Korea, KakaoTalk is the most widely used mobile messaging app, while Naver is the dominant search engine and web portal used by a majority of the population, above Google.

Meanwhile, Facebook is the country’s most popular social networking site and YouTube is the top video-sharing platform used by locals.

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)