KT on Naver's new front page

The Korea Times has a good article about how Naver's new front page format has affected web traffic to news organizations:

If Naver, the country’s most popular website by a large margin, seriously aimed for News Stand to help bring class and integrity to Korean journalism, it appears to have miscalculated massively.

Or perhaps, the clean-up talk was the Internet giant’s own misleading headline concealing its true intentions to gag the noisy rabble from bigger media companies.[...]

News organizations have always been uneasy about their overreliance on Naver and constantly accused it of free-riding on their content. Large newspapers like the Chosun Ilbo, which by and large have been failing to extend their offline dominance online, were complaining their articles were just a few of the hundreds of options randomly published by Naver, where brand value was neutralized.

In introducing News Stand, Naver was throwing its hard-to-please media partners a bone: the larger newspapers and broadcasters could safely expect Naver readers to pick them over their smaller competitors.

But be careful what you wish for. Since the introduction of News Stand, overall page views at news sites have dropped dramatically.

Do read the rest. As a commenter notes at the KT site, this is a well written article - hopefully we'll see more of the same from the KT.