Versus: allkpop & Soompi’s Divergent Approaches To Their Forums

If you’ve been following along on Soompi‘s Twitter recently, you’d be hard pressed not to notice their drastic change in approach to the social media medium. They had previously used it similarly to how allkpop currently uses it, which is as a vehicle to tweet links to their stories, but Soompi has recently been trying to drive attention towards their forums as well.

Normally when one of allkpop or Soompi does something new, the other side is quick to answer (such is the world of business), but allkpop is yet to respond in kind, thus leading to one of the more significant differences between the two.

In a nutshell, this switch showcases how both management teams share distinctly different views on forums and their purpose in business.

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allkpop sees their forums as a necessary evil of sorts. It’s something that has to exist so that their users have a chance to interact with each other on a personal level, but something that they obviously do not waste time developing or even trying to monetize effectively. In fact, their article comment section is the real point of focus, as evidenced by their implemented badge system and users of the month feature for their article commenters.

Soompi has been built on the strength of their forums, and their news department is what grew out of it. Their forums are something that they’ve traditionally used to draw attention with and popularity from, so while it shouldn’t be shocking that they’re trying to capitalize on that, it did take a while to get it underway publicly. In the last month or so they’ve really come with an onslaught of attention drawing tweets for it, and they’ve put an effort into capitalizing on what built their brand. I’ve already mentioned the Twitter aspect of it to start this article, but they’ve been discretely monetizing the forum with ads and have planned exposure to their officially run debate threads. Moreover, their point of emphasis has been to draw attention to their forum users.

In their different approaches, we can see how both companies are attempting to power revenue. allkpop features their article commenters and gives them incentives to continue because they want people commenting/viewing their articles. After all, that means increased page views, increased unique users, and increased advertising revenue. In contrast, Soompi features their forum commenters because they try to diversify their revenue streams between both forums and news, as well as capitalize on their own strengths.

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Since Soompi is the site actively making changes, it’s interesting to see how they approach it with forum topics.

Everything from Korean entertainment relevant news to completely off topic news is being promoted.

Remember, forums are notoriously hard to monetize. That is what led to the recent emergence of Soompi’s news department, but the reality is that the majority of their traffic is still forum based, hence their desire to drive traffic through it and the attempts to capitalize on it through debate/troll topics.

Offensive and absurd? Yes. Attention getting, traffic drawing, and comment baiting? Absolutely.

Yet sites like Asian Junkie are the troll sites? Laughable.

No, really. They truly care about your feelings on this. No, of course they aren’t merging fans of two incredibly popular series in their target demographic. God, why so skeptical?!

Kill me.

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Why would a Korean entertainment site do this? Simple. Arguments promote attention.

The more topics that will inevitably challenge the widely varying viewpoints of the social, cultural, and political backgrounds that is the international fandom, the better off the forum will be monetarily.

It’s always about the money, stupid.

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In a general sense, the methods of both sites are logical for their own needs. allkpop plays it close to the vest with their forums by basically not doing anything with them, while Soompi has stepped out a bit on a limb to drive additional traffic to their strength.

My concern though is that I’m seeing more resentment of Soompi’s choice of forum topics than genuine interest, so one has to wonder whether it creates more long term benefit or damage considering their forums were doing fine without this push.