Yahoo! Korea held prep rally for cheerleading squad (composed of 160 people) leaving for World Cup Soccer in Germany on 28th, May. Yahoo! Korea under its main strategy to increase visitors to its site, decided to use the World Cup event on its sports corner initially.

World’s biggest sports event came just few steps to the front door. In South Korea, maybe due to its success of reaching semi final in previous FIFA 2002 tournament made World Cup related marketing so fierce like trying to qualify for one of 32 teams to making cuts to the main tournament. Portal sites also are no exception to this kind of competition.

As early as end of last year, many domestic Korean internet portals have opened and begun services related to the World Cup event with related news and pictures, even streaming videos to get ahead. Not only the official online World Cup sponsoring partner ‘Yahoo! Korea’ but also ‘Red Devils’ official online partner ‘Naver’and ‘Daum’ contract with KFA (Korean Football Association) and ‘Empas’ with its own site corner called ‘Total Soccer’, all operates its own World Cup sites.

Out of these, Yahoo! Korea gets most attention, thanks to being the official global partner to FIFA. Unlike others, it took chance with showing highlights and glory of previous winning moments with FIFA and sports contents.

2002 FIFA and WBC showed promising signs
According to stats from Korean Click online surveyor, Yahoo came in 4th behind Naver, Daum, and Nate in last May. Its desperate attempts to recover previous glories have not shown much result. However, with 2002 FIFA World Cup combined with WBC (World Baseball Classics) earlier this year have shown some good results.

Since September 2001, Yahoo have signed multi year contract as a FIFA’s official web partner and has opened, and operated official FIFA website and marketing with the FIFA. Yahoo!Korea have enjoyed benefits of being the official FIFA partner with previous 2002 FIFA tournament where Korea reached all the way to semi-final. At that time, the number of Pageview (PV) reached to whopping 3 million and monthly new members increased to two to three times more than average to one million people.

In addition, in last March, thanks to carrying live WBC online broadcasts and commercials have significantly increased visitors to its site. In News category, visitors (UV) and page view (PV) racked in 37% of total visitors (150% jumps) and especially in those days carrying broadcast to Korean games, PV jumped to 267 percent. As a result, the Yahoo! Korea’s main page and PV increased 12% and 17% respectively.

Sports events used to lure Netizens
This is how Yahoo! Korea plans to continue providing world sports events to attract more visitors and also to supplement quality of its contents and services on long term base.

In recent, Yahoo! Sports UV is rapidly increasing. In early April’s 1.04 million visitors are up to 1.83 million according to latest count in mid May showing rapid growth toward opening of World Cup. Out of these figures show that actual visitor to Yahoo! World Cup page are over 1.77 million showing the popularity and dominant force the FIFA event brings.

Following the success of WBC last March, Yahoo! Korea is counting on this year’s FIFA World Cup to help them rebound even before the official opening of the tournament. President of Yahoo! Korea Nak-Yang Seong said “Major leagues and World Cup Soccer are most popular sports in Korea. We possess abundant supply of digital contents of baseball and soccer. In future, we will provide these kinds of sports contents to Korean market and this years FIFA 2006 in Germany is no exception to this. In fact, it will play a key role for us.”

World Cup is special but receiving some negative criticisms
However some of the industry analysts made some negative comments toward Yahoo! Korea’s sports contents tactics.

Yahoo have the exclusive contract as a FIFA sponsor but actual broadcast rights belong to ‘Daum’ and related news will be first dominated by domestic Korea’s biggest portal site Naver. The Naver does not carry any rights to FIFA events but plans to provide latest and utmost news to its wide range of users to fulfill their needs.

Daum owns the rights to both live and rebroadcasts of online World Cup matches and mobile video broadcasts. They will use these broadcasts to bring up their UCC video service. Daum’s World Cup TFT team leader Tae-Ho Kim said “Daum will carry live broadcast with just 3 minutes of delay. Yahoo! Korea does not have rights to live broadcasts like with WBC broadcasts in the past.”

One industry analyst pointed out “Yahoo Korea is enjoying the success with the sports contents on their site now but what about the after the big event’s closure? That issue could be troublesome to them. And unlike with WBC tournaments, most of these World Cup matches will be played at wee hours of day and therefore relaying on expectations of huge viewers and special turnouts could come back to haunt them.”

Baseball, Fights and other sports coverage to be expanded
Yahoo Korea also acknowledges to some of these criticisms. An affiliate from Yahoo! Korea said “We recognize having some disadvantages in News service or World Cup related video streaming service compare to Daum and Naver.” But Yahoo! Korea has the exclusives to the highest quality of information and its army of 160 people will be utilized to help bring latest UCC news.

Yahoo!Korea with this year’s FIFA event has expressed that they’re more interested in raising the company’s image rather than just racking up the World Cup related profits. Also marketing budget wasn’t that big due to uncertainty of outcome with all the competitors it have to battle with. Instead, with the exclusives from FIFA, signed co-op with LGT, Samsung Life, MegaBox, Woorie Bank. As for a small consolation, Yahoo! Korea can find some satisfaction with related advertising earnings surpassing cost of its initial investments by small margin with the project.

President Seong said “Due to impending World Cup and since WBC last March, visitors jumped to 20% more. It was the best figure for us in last 4 years. To keep this kind of numbers, we will continue to concentrate heavily in sports contents and for the post-World Cup, we will be concentrating on baseball and fights to refresh our position and also put more efforts into our main search engine service.”