Hallyu stars fuel Seoul City’s website boom

More than 50 million people worldwide visited Seoul City’s international promotion websites last year, with hallyu entertainers the major reason for the boom.

According to the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the number of visitors to nine of its websites run in Japanese, English and Chinese marked 5,057,465 last year, about 15 times that of its official Korean site (www.seoul.go.kr).

The lion’s share went to Chinese with 28 million visiting the video streaming site (shouer.youku.com).

More than 68.8 million people have visited the site since June 2008, when the city government first opened it on Xina.com, one of China’s largest portal sites. The most popular content was the city’s tourism promotion video clip starring pop group Wonder Girls, marking 1.3 million page views.

About 1.2 million English users visited youtube.com/seouldreamseries and the most popular item was the online B-boy battle clip, drawing 617,037 clicks.

More than 120,000 Japanese users visited three sites ― blogs.yahoo.co.jp/hi_seoul_travel, seoul.blogs.yahoo.co.jp and youtube.com/hiseoul ― which were established in May. Actor Lee Byung-hun’s TV advertisement drew the most attention.

The city administration’s marketing department selected China and Japan as the “core” regions for promotion, Southeast Asian countries as a “focused” region, as well as the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia and others as “with potential” regions. But with the overseas marketing budget cut down to 990 million won ($88,390) this year from 2.5 billion won last year, events and promotions will be downsized, officials said.

“Since much of the content is softer than that uploaded on official sites, people like it and become easily attached. The cutback of the budget is a challenge but we will manage,” Kang Young-gyu, head of the marketing department, said.

By Bae Ji-sook (baejisook@heraldcorp.com)