YouTube most used mobile platform in South Korea in Dec

Seoul, Jan 5 (IANS) The video streaming service YouTube was the most used mobile app in South Korea in December, industry data showed on Sunday, while China's shopping platform Temu ranked as the top newly installed app.

The Google-owned streaming platform recorded 46.82 million monthly active users last month, followed by KakaoTalk, South Korea's top mobile messenger, with 45.5 million, according to data from industry tracker IGAWorks.

Naver, the country's top search engine, had 43.77 million active users, followed by Google with 37.59 million, reports Yonhap news agency.

Coupang, a major South Korean shopping platform, recorded 32 million users in December, standing as the leading e-commerce operator.

In terms of new downloads, the Chinese e-commerce app Temu ranked first in South Korea last month, with 1.17 million new installations.

Instagram, a social media platform, followed with 825,982 new downloads, and TikTok Lite came next with 818,861, the data showed.

The industry tracker, however, noted that despite its high number of downloads, Temu's market presence remains less significant as the proportion of users abandoning the app within a month of downloading it is estimated at 37 to 50 per cent.

Google-owned YouTube generated $8.92 billion in advertising revenue for the third quarter of 2024. YouTube’s total ads and subscription revenue surpassed $50 billion over the past four quarters for the first time, according to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

YouTube’s ad revenue, reported as part of parent Alphabet’s Q3 earnings, was up 12.2 per cent year over year.

During the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics, over 850 million unique viewers watched more than 40 billion minutes of content on the platform, resulting in 12 billion views. More than 35 per cent of the viewers watched it on their television screens.