Contrary Evaluations over Online-Stamp System

Contrary Evaluations over Online-Stamp System. April. 11, 2002 09:01. by Chang-Won Kim changkim@donga.com.

`Success, or failure?`

There are contrary evaluations about whether the Online-Stamp System (OSS) is successful or not.

OSS is a price-charging device that Daum applied to certain enterprises, which send more than 1,000 commercial emails, since this month.

While Daum decided on an interim evaluation that it is successful, a number of Internet enterprises, which are opposing the issue of charging for emails, refuted that `it is different from the truth`.

Daum’s ground for insisting on the success is that Spam mails reduced greatly after the OSS, but subscribers hardly seceded.

Daum’s advertising manager Won Yoon-Sik said, “The total number of average incoming mails per day cut down to half from 6.3 million to 3.2 million, raising the delivery speed twice as fast.” He also explains that Spam mail reports, which reached average 130,000 cases every day until March, decreased below 40,000 cases in April, but the number of subscribers or clicks on the website, which counts 400 million times daily, has no change.

However, the opposing enterprises are insisting that “Netizens are increasingly changing their Daum’s Hanmail accounts to other mail accounts”.

In relation to so, Interpark totalized that 13.4 Per Cent of Daum-mail subscribers changed their mail accounts between the 18th and 31st last month. It also explained that the rate of real consumers with Hanmail accounts reduced from 42.8 Per Cent to 10.3 Per Cent.

Game-enterprise Nexon, which has 5 million subscribers, reported that Hanmail-account owners sharply decreased from 80 Per Cent down to 40 Per Cent. Internet bookstore YES24 also reported that 100,000 users recently changed their mail accounts to other service providers than Daum during the past one week.

Experts say that because Korean netizens usually have 2 or 3 mail accounts, their change of Hanmail accounts cannot be seen as unsubscribe. However, some predict that if such changes accumulate, it will bring much change in the email market.

“If netizens start changing their mail accounts because of the OSS, Daum’s influence might decrease greatly,” said deputy manager Kim Byung-Suk of Yahoo Korea, which secured 1 million new email subscribers in March alone.