Interesting start-up, UCC Community

UCC Community (www.uccc.co.kr), based in Pusan and up and running from this February, is one of the biggest UCC sites in Korea. It has been growing at an explosive rate reaching 3M daily visitors and 10M daily search hits within the first six months of launching the service.

Kim Jong-man, the company CEO, gives credit to the innovative marketing strategy for the success. Users can get W1 for each view by other users of the UCC they scrapped from the company site to their blogs or other sites. The company monthly spends W100 m in marketing, and expects to make profits from October or November by advertising.

Some users actually make money by scrapping UCCs from the site and uploading them on big portals sites where the number of viewers are great. The company revealed the activity is very popular among students and housewives and some monthly earn more than W5m.

According to Albaro, an arbeit site, the number of UCC-related moonlightings was 12 in the first half of last year, but soared to 102 during the same period this year.

The popularity of the site comes partly from the fact that users can safely view video clips without downloading and installing ‘Active X,’ a software that users usually bother to install in order to watch video clips and a channel often blamed for viruses.

The company has been recently chosen as one of 100 most promising star-ups in Asia by Red Herring ( http://herringevents.com/asia07/redherring100.html). It is in talks with a Japanese venture capital to receive $100 bn in investment.