NHN Leaps Over China’s Great Wall to Maintain its Competitive Leadership Position

NHN Corporation is a leading Internet Company in Korea operating the nation’s top search portal Naver and online game portal Hangame. Naver has grown into the Korea’s most visited search portal with ground-breaking service initiatives, such as ‘Unified Search’ and ‘Knowledge iN’ as well as Mail, Blog and Cafes (online communities), Shopping, Real-time Rising Keywords, Dictionary, Local information and many other services adding convenience to everyday lives. In January 2009, Naver introduced its open information platform, such as ‘OpenCast’ and ‘NewsCast’ on its re-launched starting page. Naver is known to be connected in over 165 countries around the world and was ranked 5th in terms of search queries among global Internet search engines by US Internet market survey company Comscore in 2007. \n\nHangame is Korea’s largest online game portal providing games in various genres ranging from web-board, casual, action, FPS, RPG games. Based on outstanding game development capability, Hangame develops and services various online games such as GoStop, Poker, Yutnori, Baduk, and successfully published leading on-line games including Turbine’s ‘The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar’ and Capcom’s ‘Monster Hunter Frontier Online’. NHN surpassed annual revenue of USD 1 billion in 2008 and generated USD 1.2 billion in 2009 and continues to post strong revenue growth and the highest net profit ratio among Internet companies not only in Korea but also in the US, Japan and China.

NHN Corporation operates two of the web’s most popular properties in Korea: Naver and Hangame. The two sites together average 950 million page views and 17 million visitors per day. However, NHN’s analysis of website visitor behavior showed that many of its China-based visitors were prematurely abandoning the Naver and Hangame sites. This puzzled NHN management, because NHN was serving the same high-quality content to China’s market as it did to the rest of the world. After more thorough analysis, NHN’s IT team noticed that slow page-load times within China were causing visitors there to spend less time and view fewer pages on the site. NHN’s Director of the CDN Management Team, Sewon Jang, summarized the problem this way: “The quality of content itself is important, but without fast page downloads, site visitors won’t stick around long enough to see all of our great content.” \n\nWith the 2008 Beijing Olympics right around the corner, NHN wanted to act fast to rectify its website performance issues. This would enable NHN to maintain a firm grasp on its web portal leadership position among China’s Korean-language audience. The company knew that there would be an enormous upswing in Korean-language search engine traffic, and it did not want search engine competitors to steal away market share in China with better site performance. According to Jang, “We needed to be faster than any other Korean portals to be the predominant player in China.”

NHN decided that the best way to guarantee high performance of its websites within China would be to serve all of its content from local servers based inside China. The company had tried to optimize the technology within its own data center to improve content delivery into China, but page-load times remained slow. Sometimes complete outages would occur, and visitors would receive no content at all. As a result, NHN had to locate website delivery infrastructure within China. But doing so meant obtaining the proper business licenses required by the Chinese government, which frequently takes months to do. \n\nNHN investigated options for obtaining its China business licenses faster. The NHN team soon discovered that content delivery networks (CDNs) based within China could help speed NHN’s licensing approval. In addition, because CDNs already had distributed networks of servers within China, they could ensure faster download times for NHN’s web portal. NHN decided to enlist the services of a CDN with local operations within China to serve NHN’s key content there. By leveraging a CDN, NHN hoped to overcome two problems at once: its website performance issues and the lengthy business licensing process. \n\nNHN evaluated the few CDN providers within China and chose CDNetworks. “CDNetworks quickly became the obvious choice for us, because it was the only CDN provider that could help meet both our China business licensing schedule and our website performance requirements,” said Jang. CDNetworks had been operating in China for several years, utilizing its own CDN infrastructure along with local business professionals. Shortly after establishing operations in China, CDNetworks developed its China Acceleration solution, which is specifically designed to address the two issues faced by NHN: website performance within China and establishing required business licensing to deliver content to China’s Internet users.

• Achieved fast entry into China in time for key event, 2008 Olympics
• Eliminated mysterious service outages occurring behind China’s firewall
• Improved website performance and visitor loyalty in China and across the globe
• Simplified infrastructure with a single source for website delivery worldwide

• NHN provides visitors with free access to the Naver portal and the broad choices of information that it contains