At the beginning of the month, our CEO and co-founder Tim Koschella had the opportunity to sit down with Korean IT media company Microsoftware for a passionate talk on the history of mobile advertising, the idiosyncrasies of the Korean market, the rise of programmatic and the future of the industry. Here is a carefully translated version of the interview. If you would like to brush up on your Korean, head here.
The Past of Mobile Advertising
The early 2000s marked the beginnings of online advertising in Korea. Portal sites and search engines such as Naver, Daum, and Google started to sell banner ads and the traffic was monetized through CPC ads. Korea had the particularity of having one portal site owning almost 75% percent of search queries. The so-called ‘adtech’ or ‘online advertising technology’ was not really necessary in this context.