S. Koreans Spending More Time on Netflix, TikTok: Survey

This file photo, taken Oct. 30, 2020, shows visitors at an Apple store in southern Seoul using iPhones. (Yonhap)

SEOUL, Oct. 20 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean smartphone users are spending more time on video sharing platform TikTok and video streaming service Netflix than last year, a survey showed Tuesday.

Mobile app tracker Wiseapp conducted a survey of 38.7 million Android smartphone users and 8.6 million iOS smartphone users over 10 years of age, which showed that they spent 4.6 billion minutes on TikTok last month, which was 64.3 percent longer than the 2.8 billion minutes recorded in September of last year.

South Korean smartphone users spent a total of 4.2 billion minutes on Netflix last month, which was 64.3 percent longer than the 2.6 billion minutes spent in September last year.

Last month, mobile messenger KakaoTalk was the app with the most users (43.9 million people), followed by YouTube (42 million people), Naver (39.3 million people) and Coupang (24 million people).

South Koreans used YouTube the longest, spending a total of 70.1 billion minutes last month, followed by KakaoTalk (27.9 billion minutes), Naver (19.7 billion minutes), Instagram (7.1 billion minutes) and TikTok (4.6 billion minutes).

The most frequently used app was KakaoTalk last month (96.1 billion times), followed by Naver (20.7 billion times), Twitter (12.4 billion times), YouTube (12.2 billion times) and Instagram (8.8 billion times).

Compared to the previous year, Instagram had the highest rate of increase in terms of usage, rising by 44 percent from 6.1 billion times in September last year to 8.8 billion times last month.

Ashley Song (ashley@koreabizwire.com)