San Francisco — Google Inc. on Friday announced that it has acquired South Korean blogging software platform developer Tatter and Company (TNC), in a bid to expand the Internet search leaders reach into Asian market where it has a minimal presence.
The acquisition, announced by TNC’s co-CEO Chang-Won Kim on his personal blog in a posting Friday titled “We’ve been Googled!”, saying that the acquisition would help Google increase its market share in the country, and the same was confirmed by Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, reflects Google’s efforts to open up new distribution channels for its ads beyond its ubiquitous search engine.
“Korea is the world’s sixth largest market in terms of internet users, and yet Google has a market share that can only be described as ‘minor’ in Korea,” Kim wrote in his blog.
Tatter and Company is similar to “Automattic,” a company that makes software to complement and extend the open source WordPress blog publishing platform.
Portals such as Naver.com (the fifth most used search engine in the world, according to ComScore), Daum.net and Nate.com are much more popular in Korea, and according to the Korea Times, the move will allow Google to “spur development of user-oriented contents [sic] using the blogging tool, which will contribute to strengthening its search ability as well.”
TNC’s blogging software, TextCube, is an equivalent to WordPress in the U.S., and Kim boasts in his blog that TNC “services to 400K+ users, including 65 of Korea’s top 100 bloggers (as of 1H 2007).”
Similar to Google’s 2003 acquisition of the Blogger platform, the deal for TNC could also help Google continue improving its techniques for scouring and synthesizing blog content and tailor ads more precisely to specific markets.
For its third acquisition in 2008, Google has for the second time gone shopping abroad.
“We are excited to welcome Tatter and Company’s engineering team to Google Korea,” said a Google spokesperson in an e-mailed statement. “Acquiring Tatter and Company will allow us to enhance our online publishing tools in Korea, benefiting a large number of users who already depend on and enjoy Google and Tatter and Company’s products.”
Kim said Google has struggled to gain market share in Korea because many Internet users there are locked into Web portal-style services. He says that the acquisition is the first Google has done in Asia outside of China. The deal, he expects, will help improve Google’s “minor” market share in South Korea, a state of affairs he attributes to the South Korean preference for staying within Web portals rather than venturing to all manner of online sites for information and services.
Details of the acquisition were not disclosed on the posting on Chang-Won’s blog. In discussing the deal on his blog Kim also wrote that, as a part of Google, TNC will work on increasing Google’s market share.
“Of course, Google is not entitled with God-given right to become number 1 in every region it operates in, just because it is Google,” he wrote. “It is actually more about the Korean web industry than about Google. I think the Korean web industry needs a player that can, as a balancing force, provide more options to the users and help create a more open web.”
He said the company is “hopelessly behind in terms of globalizing our product” but that under Google’s wing it will attempt to introduce Textcube outside of Korea.
While Google and TNC are working to create a more open Web, the South Korean government may be working against them. Stung by protests driven in part by people-powered media and bloggers, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak has been pushing for new Internet regulations to curb what online reporters can say.
In an interview last month with The Guardian in the United Kingdom, Lee Han-ki, editor-in-chief of OhmyNews, a leading Korean portal for citizen journalists, said, “The proposed legislation will not only hinder free speech by Korean netizens but seems to be aimed at controlling the public opinion of Internet news media.”
So if Google can sneak in through the bloggers’ back door, perhaps it can pick up some headway against the area’s dominant search portals.
The companies did not disclose how much Google paid for the acquisition.