Daum (web portal)

Daum (다음) is a South Korean web portal. It offers various Internet services to web users, including a popular free web-based e-mail, messaging services, shopping, news, and webtoon services. The word "Daum" means "next" and also "diverse voices" in Korean. After competing with Yahoo Korea and Naver in the 2000s and 2010s, it has undergone a extended period of decline after its merger with Kakao in 2014, leading to the slow phasing-out of the Daum name in various services, including changing its name from Daum Kakao to Kakao, the migration of its accounts to Kakao accounts, and the closure or renaming into Kakao-branded services of various services, such as Kakao Webtoon (formerly Daum Webtoon) and KakaoTV (formerly Daum PotPlayer).

Background
The popularity of Daum stems from the range of services it offers, but also from the fact that it was the first Korean web portal of significant size. Its popularity started when it merged with the then most popular e-mail service, daum.net or hanmail.net. After the merging, Daum started the forum service Daum Cafe which brought it firm status in the market. Daum received the eighth-highest trust rating in a 2020 Reuters Institute survey of selected South Korean media outlets.

History
The former Daum Communications Corporation was founded in 1994 by  and Lee Jae-woong (businessperson), and the company launched the namesake portal in May 1997 making it the first South Korean web portal, four months earlier than yahoo! Korea.

From 2003, Daum started on-line direct automobile insurance by launching the subsidiary 'Daum Direct Auto Insurance' and from 2008, it became a partnership company with ERGO Insurance Group.

On August 2, 2004, Daum announced the purchase of Lycos for $95.4 million, and closed the transaction on October 6. As part of a corporate restructuring to focus on mobile, social networks and location-based services, Daum sold Lycos for $36 million in August 2010 to Ybrant Digital, an internet marketing company based in Hyderabad, India.

In 2006, they started a blogging service Tistory with 'Tatter and Company', a blogging platform developing company and in July 2007 Daum took over all rights to manage the services.

The company also develops and distributes the freeware media player PotPlayer. In addition to its freeware media player (Daum tvPot), Daum Communications Corp. provides a variety of services such as clouding service (Daum Cloud), Daum Dictionary (applicable on mobile devices), Daum Comics, and map service (Daum Maps).

Daum has about 874 employees as of March 2009, and was the 2nd largest web portal service provider in South Korea in terms of daily visits.

In 2014, Daum merged with Kakao Corp. (at that time known as Kakao Inc.), known as the maker of KakaoTalk, to form Daum Kakao.