Average of 150 Minutes Spent on YouTube on Weekends Last Month…Short-form Content Still Popular
(Seoul=Yonhap News) Reporter Kim Kyung-hee = It was found that more than half of Koreans watch YouTube for about two hours a day.
According to IGAWorks’ Mobile Index on the 2nd, as of the 25th of last month, YouTube’s total usage time, whose parent company is Google, was 69,656,607 hours, the longest among all apps.
The daily active user count (DAU) stood at 29,988,308, with an average usage time per person of 139.37 minutes.
In particular, in February, the average usage time per person on YouTube was below 140 minutes on only four days, including the 25th (139.18 minutes), 7th (139.2 minutes), and 21st (139.43 minutes). On the remaining days, the daily average usage time exceeded two hours.
Every Sunday, like the 2nd (153.13 minutes), 9th (153.17 minutes), 16th (151.15 minutes), and 23rd (152.12 minutes), the average usage time exceeded 150 minutes.
Effectively, three out of five Koreans consume more than two hours of YouTube content, including short-form videos, each day.
Instagram, also popular among younger users with its short video content called ‘Reels’, had an average daily usage time of 50 minutes.
On the most recent data point on the 25th of last month, Instagram had 13,403,858 daily active users with an average usage time of 50.58 minutes per person.
In contrast, the time spent using local apps Naver and KakaoTalk was relatively short.
On the same day, KakaoTalk had 37,164,806 daily active users with an average usage time of 30.12 minutes.
Naver had 26,510,141 daily active users with an average usage time of 25.4 minutes.
Combined, Naver and Kakao’s average daily usage time is less than an hour.
Both Naver and Kakao are striving to find breakthroughs to escape these limitations.
Naver is aggressively developing its short-form service, Clipping.
Since launching Clipping in August 2023, Naver has highlighted it across its platform to quickly boost playback numbers. Internally, it is considered to have reached the third place in domestic short-form services.
Kakao is focusing on capturing the 10s and 20s demographic, who are the main consumers of digital trends and fans of YouTube’s ‘shorts’ and Instagram’s ‘Reels’.
Recently, Kakao established a ‘school’ tab within KakaoTalk Open Chat and started a pilot run targeting 30 universities, including Seoul National University and Korea University.
kyunghee@yna.co.kr