[4] [Editors Note: The following case study was written before Roh Moo-hyun won the presidential election in South Korea in November 2003. The critical factor in his winning the presidency was the support and active participation of the South Korean netizens movement. OhmyNews is reported to have played a significant role in that movement.] OhmyNews.com: A Case Study by K. Jean Min kjean@kgsm.kaist.ac.kr "The Net is vast and infinite," mulls a cyborg agent, Kusanagi, in a cyberpunk anime Ghost in the Shell before she jumps into the Net with her newfound body. Oh Yeon-ho also dreamed of jumping into the Net someday with a slightly different idea; recruit a corps of young cyber reporters from the vast and infinite Net. For his master's degree in mass-communication during his stay in United States, he wrote a paper on the start-up of a news media business. He aspired to publish a news media powerful enough to compete with major newspapers or broadcasting stations in terms of agenda-setting power. But doing so required a huge sum of capital investment and hundreds of seasoned professional reporters. With the meager money he raised from his pocket and that of a couple of other investors, he realized the only answer lay in the Internet. So was launched OhmyNews.com, the first Korean vernacular Internet news service made purely by Netizens. Within just two years it has earned a rock-solid reputation as one of the most influential Internet news sites among Korean netizens. Last year it was ranked as 8th influential news media in Korea by the annual Sisa Journal survey, a fast and unprecedented success in the fierce Korean news business. Currently it is enticing more than a million visitors everyday, an all time high number throughout its short life. Company Overview ------------------------------------------------- |-Founded; February 22nd. 2000 | |-Initial capital; KRW 200M won ($170,000) | |-Product/Service: On-line daily news provider | |-Major income source: | | banner advertising(70%), | | journalism school (20%), | | news contents sale (10%), | | OhmyNews 2002 (Weekly News magazine), | | classified ads | |-Market value: not listed yet | |-Competition: no serious contenders in general | | on-line daily news category except Pressian | ------------------------------------------------- Turn-Off How did it grow so fast? First of all, venturing into a news business, especially print news requires a huge initial investment. You have to build a massive printing plant, hire at least a couple of hundred reporters and establish a national distribution network in a single month or two. Even if you execute this daunting job quickly and flawlessly, there is no guarantee of success whatsoever. This is because such powerful media giants as Chosun Ilbo, Joongang Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo already dominate the Korean news market with their combined market share hovering around a whopping 70%. Moreover they wield exclusive power over their critical national distribution network. It is virtually impossible to penetrate into the news market to say nothing of surviving as a major player even if you possess unlimited resources. In other words, the Korean print news market was heavily fortified to protect the dominance of the incumbent players. The clear evidence is Hyundai's failed endeavor. Hyundai group founder Chung Ju Young tried to set his foot into the news business by introducing Munhwa Ilbo with a hidden aim of using it as a political leverage during the upcoming presidential election in 1992. Neither he nor his beloved Munhwa Ilbo succeeded in this bold endeavor though he poured hundreds of billions of wons until he finally sold his stake in the paper. Munhwa Ilbo was ranked way below OhmyNews in the same survey conducted by Sisa Journal last year. Turn-On OhmyNews learned a lot from the fate of Munhwa Ilbo. It realized that venturing into the newspaper market was an insane idea and decided to create a daily news media existing and operating only in cyberspace. That way it could save tons of money which otherwise it had to provide by borrowing or fund-raising. Secondly it opened its news gathering web server to all Netizens. Anyone who has something to tell or bits of news whom it calls News Guerillas can log on to the OhmyNews server, type in his or her story and upload related pictures. Dedicated editors in OhmyNews scan them and evaluate quality and validity of each article a netizen has reported and select ones that satisfy the preset guideline. Each netizen reporter will be rewarded with cyber cash depending on the number and importance of selected articles. That way OhmyNews could produce enough news content without hiring a bunch of dedicated reporters. The validity of such a radical idea had already been proven. Countless numbers of cyber writers were flexing their editorial muscle on various web-logs, bulletin boards or their own homepages. OhmyNews was confident that a lot of talented writers are out there starving for public recognition. That is exactly what OhmyNews provided; public cyberspace where an amateur cyber writer can express his or her writing skill in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of netizens with some cash rewards as a bonus. The cash reward per each article offered by the editing desk is a meager amount. Depending on the level of news space hierarchy that each article had occupied, the cyber reporter was paid one thousand, five thousand or ten thousand won respectively (from $.85 to $8.50). Nonetheless, cyber reporters or columnists did not care much about the money. After all, they were rewarded already when their editorials, columns or reports were given a little shaft of floodlight. Since the news space of OhmyNews was professionally presented in terms of the look and feel and design esthetics compared with other amateur web-logs, cyber writers were generally more satisfied than elsewhere. OhmyNews started with 700 plus news guerillas when it was launched back in Feb. 2000 but quickly gained thousands of new guerillas month after month until it reached over 18,000 as of May 2002. On the other hand, as the futurist Alvin Tofler once predicted in his book Future Shock, these netizen reporters could be deemed as true 'prosumers' in that they participate in the production of news stories that they would consume themselves. This strategy again reinforced readers' loyalty to OhmyNews since it assured them that their voice was heard. Demographics of News Guerillas (As of Nov. 2001) ------------------------------------------- |Sex Number % | | | |Male 11189 74.40% | |Female 3838 25.60% | | | |Age Number % | | | |10~19 1593 10.60% | |20~29 6782 45.10% | |30~39 4872 32.40% | |40~49 1454 9.70% | |50~59 258 1.70% | |60~70 56 0.40% | |70~79 17 0.10% | | | |Occupation Number % | | | |Undergraduates 3515 23.40% | |Others 2408 16.00% | |White Collar 2276 15.10% | |Journalist 1391 9.30% | |Small Business 750 5.00% | |Self employed 720 4.80% | |High school student 696 4.60% | |Graduates 582 3.90% | |IT 564 3.80% | |Middle school student 527 3.50% | |Teachers 481 3.20% | |Public servant 375 2.50% | |Arts 234 1.60% | |Homemaker 199 1.30% | |Medical 124 0.80% | |Armed force 106 0.70% | |Farmer 60 0.40% | |Legal 24 0.20% | ------------------------------------------- Lastly, it redefined the scope of news itself. OhmyNews shattered conventional wisdom that only stories about the who's who in politics, economy and cultural arena can merit being treated as "news". Why should ordinary people be fed with tons of irrelevant news they have no use for?, it asked. This Copernican about-face on the concept of the news came as a shock to the majority of Korean netizens. Since the majority of news consumers were deeply dissatisfied with the autocratic voice and arbitrary editorials of the Big Three newspapers, this iconoclastic approach to news created a stir among young readers. Take off As OhmyNews gained attention and became the talk of the town, the number of newly joining news guerillas as well as daily visitors began to explode. To make these first-time visitors come again, and hence retain them as permanent readers, OhmyNews devised from its inception another hook named Readers' Voice. Readers' Voice worked this way. Each visitor can jot down his or her comment below each article. If he likes a certain article, he can show his preference by clicking into an accompanying banner. The first attempt of this kind in the news business. Each click translates into 50 won (4.25 cents) additional reward for the netizen reporters. To earn as much money as possible netizen reporters should do their best to produce quality news. And some readers would visit OhmyNews with a single purpose of enjoying readers' comments. Often, Readers' Voice quickly escalated into the de facto Readers' Forum as readers chatted and fought among themselves. Some hotly debated topics would casually draw more than a thousand reader comments, a phenomenal number for a fledgling Internet news media. That gave another boost for its page view performance. Readers' Voice became so popular among netizens that even OhmyNews' powerful archrival Chosun Ilbo decided to adopt this service into Dizzo, its Internet equivalent. Readers' Voice proved an ultimate device to exploit the interactivity of the Internet. All these efforts combined with occasional scoops brought handsome rewards to OhmyNews. Visitors and page views of the site literally exploded. They marveled at 100,000 plus daily visitors during the first year when OhmyNews reported a comical sit-down demonstration of former president Kim Young Sam for 24 hours. This incident epitomized the potential of the Internet as the most favored news media to deliver "history as it happens". Soon this record was broken when OhmyNews reported the fuss over the U.S. Presidential Election in late 2000. Record after record was broken to create new heights of daily visitors statistics. Live cast of the historic event as it actually happened glued the readers to the site creating a powerful stickiness factor. There was an increasing pattern of daily visitors as well as website ranking since its foundation in Feb. 2000 up until May 2000. As time went by, the news content by news guerillas was stacked up to produce a huge amount. OhmyNews published several books containing ordinary stories by ordinary news guerillas. Some prominent news guerillas were even approached by a publishing agency for possible publication of their columns or articles that appeared on the news site. The increasing off-line presence of OhmyNews boosted on-line power again making it the 10th and 8th most influential news media in Korea in 2000 and 2001 respectively in a survey conducted by Sisa Journal. Using the ever-increasing number of visitors and its influence as leverage, OhmyNews intensified sales of its ad space and also sold its news content to DAUM, the largest Korean portal site. Its major revenue source was comprised of ad sales (70%), journalism school (20%) and news content sales (10%) as of 2001. Live web casting from the Ruling Party Presidential Caucus However, as is the case with other Internet ventures in Korea, the phenomenal success of OhmyNews would have been impossible without the world's highest level of broadband penetration in Korea. The rapidly expanding number of broadband subscribers provided OhmyNews another jumping off point. It realized video and audio rich content could be easily carried to netizens' PCs via this fat pipe. In early March 2002, OhmyNews experimented with live web casting by airing real time pictures from the ruling party's caucus in Kwangjoo to elect a presidential candidate. It turned out to be a huge success. The OhmyNews server counted over three million unique page views in a single day, another record to be broken to reach five and six million figure each new month. With the full swing broadband environment firmly in place, OhmyNews could become anything, be it a daily newspaper, occasional broadcasting station or live web radio. By that time the dedicated reporters in OhmyNews began to call themselves a multimedia news agency. Transformation As a progressive and politics-oriented news media as OhmyNews is, it has a certain limit in terms of expanding its readership potential significantly. Establishing itself as a firm news media without losing the allure of an iconoclastic underdog is a tricky game. OhmyNews will lose its loyal readers once it tries to satisfy as many politically varied segments at once as possible. We would rather recommend it to expand the scope of its news stories significantly without deviating from its progressive and center-left biased political color. Publishing OhmyNews 2002, a weekly off-line equivalent of OhmyNews also helped. Off-line readers clicked into the on-line OhmyNews and vice versa. That way it could expand its readership foundation significantly creating on-off synergy. Focusing on covering the presidential election campaign might also help this year. The lion's share of its readership comes from the age group ranging from late twenties to early thirties, the most politically dynamic demographic segment in Korea. If it maintains this strategy we believe it can certainly jack up its ranking significantly as the most influential news media in Korea. Let's wait and see this November, when Sisa Journal conducts its annual survey named 'Korea's most admired and influential News media'. Summary & Lessons: * Netizens want their voices to be heard; they are prosumers instead of passive consumers. * OhmyNews made the most out of existing Internet infrastructure eliminating the need of a huge capital investment. * Find a way to translate huge viewership into a profit machine: banner advertising, classified ads, news contents sale, off-line publishing and shopping mall for readers. * Differentiate your image to establish political identity then stick to yourself to maintain a lasting brand entity ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 12 No 1, Winter 2003/2004 The whole issue or a subscription is available for free via email. Send a request to jrh@ais.org or see http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------