South Korea’s online news market remains heavily shaped by portals and online communities, according to traffic data and audience surveys.
Similarweb, a web-traffic analytics firm, said its March 2026 rankings for domestic “News & Media Publisher” websites put Naver News (news.naver.com) at No. 1. It was followed by FMKorea (fmkorea.com), DongA Ilbo (donga.com), Nate News (news.nate.com) and Chosun Ilbo (chosun.com). The rankings were updated April 1.
The list shows that the top tier is not dominated solely by traditional news outlets. Naver News and Nate News are portal news services rather than individual publishers, and FMKorea functions largely as an online community. Among publisher-run sites, DongA Ilbo and Chosun Ilbo ranked in the top five, but the broader pattern suggests that portals and communities still serve as key gateways for news discovery and sharing.
That structure aligns with long-standing patterns in South Korea’s digital news habits. In “Digital News Report 2025 Korea,” the Korea Press Foundation said users rely heavily on portals and news aggregation services, while direct access to publishers’ websites or apps remains limited. Only 6% of respondents said news websites or apps were their main route to news, the lowest among 48 countries surveyed. The average across the 48 countries was 23%.
The foundation’s “2025 Media Audience Survey” suggests portal news use is easing from earlier highs. It found 66.5% of respondents said they used internet portal news in the previous week in 2025, down 1.2 percentage points from a year earlier. The figure has fallen since peaking at 79.2% in 2021.
At the same time, video-based news consumption is rising quickly. The survey found news use via online video platforms climbed to 30.0% in 2025 from 18.4% in 2024, an increase of 11.6 percentage points. YouTube accounted for 92.2% of that use. Short-form news use also rose, to 22.9% in 2025 from 11.1% in 2024.
In mobile apps, the boundaries of “news” are also widening. Similarweb’s Android “News & Magazines” app rankings, as of April 18, 2026, listed X at No. 1, the investment information app SAVE at No. 2 and Google News at No. 3. Publisher and news-service apps including Chosun Ilbo, Maeil Business Newspaper, Newneek, Mobile Hankyung and Yonhap News Agency also appeared near the top. In iPhone news app rankings, X, Blind, Daum, Reddit, Newneek, The Korea Economic Daily, Maeil Business Newspaper and JoongAng Ilbo were among the leading apps.
Shifts in online rankings are closely tied to advertising. For publishers, traffic influences ad rates and revenue, but heavier reliance on portals, communities and social media can make it harder to build direct relationships with readers. The Korea Press Foundation said that even as dependence on portal news declines, users are not necessarily moving to publishers’ sites or apps, but instead shifting to other intermediaries such as social media.
The rankings, in that sense, reflect more than which outlet is read most. They point to a market where where news is found, shared and consumed can matter more than where it is produced. As portals’ dominance softens and YouTube, short-form video and communities gain influence, publishers face pressure to strengthen their own platforms and build loyal audiences beyond a simple race for clicks.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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