YouTube to launch Web site here, where many others have failed

The U.S.-based giant Web site YouTube is coming to Korea to take on Pandora TV, but skeptics here say it will be boxed in.
YouTube, the world’s largest Internet site for sharing video clips and other user-created content, will open a Korean site as early as the first half of this year.
Google purchased YouTube in October 2006, and Google Korea will operate YouTube Korea. The company plans to hold a news conference tomorrow to unveil the new site.
It will not be easy to succeed here, according to an official of Pandora TV, a potential YouTube Korea rival.
“We welcome the debut of YouTube,” said the official, who declined to be named. “It means that the UCC [user-created content] market is getting bigger. Everyone knows that YouTube has great power, but we don’t see YouTube as a threat.”
Pandora TV, Korea’s No.1 video sharing Web site, holds 36 percent of the market share for such Web sites and has 3.6 million members.
Although an official from Google Korea refused to give details about the services that YouTube Korea will provide, many predict the video-sharing Web site will provide localized content and service.
Plenty of U.S.-based Web sites have fizzled out in Korea, which has no shortage of local offerings. Search engines such as AltaVista and Lycos have closed here. Yahoo is one of the few that have survived.
Experts say the Web sites failed because they translated their English services into awkward Korean instead of creating a version from scratch.
Google, the world’s most-visited search engine, is no exception. Google launched its Web site here in 2001, but has only been able to hold a 4 percent market share. Its Korean competition Naver, by contrast, has a market share higher than 70 percent.
“As Google Korea failed to defeat its rival, Naver, YouTube Korea needs plenty of time to accumulate its own content to appeal to Korean users,” the Pandora official said.
Meanwhile, another U.S.-based Web site, MySpace, will debut here by the end of March. MySpace is a social-networking service that is popular among teenagers.

By Sung So-young Staff Reporter [so@joongang.co.kr]