Google really has their sights set on Korea and will not let go. First their failure to succeed a few years back, then the establishment of a R&D center earlier in the year. Whether they succeed this time around remains to be seen, but now, they are going to try it, not with their search, but with YouTube. This could possibly be a good start for Google, by targeting the UCC market there. I guess failure is not an option with them and playing banker is an added bonus as well.

Korea is a huge UCC or UGC market. Literally everyone there knows what it means and how to do it. I’ve seen Daum and Naver promote it everywhere and have seen television broadcasts of how powerful UCC is. Where else in the world would you find such strong promotion of UCC to the general public? If there’s a way to get into the market, this would be the one.

But it doesn’t come with competition with established locals like Pandora.tv, Beedeo, Naver Play, Mncast, and others. Local services will always be steps ahead of the foreign competition and are able to fend off foreign competition, Google and YouTube is no different, not even with all the gazillion of dollars they can throw away.

Personally, I don’t expect YouTube to be very successful either, not with translating a site. A redesign could have prove a better result. I hope they really get those people at their R&D center to redesign an entire site, with the (what we foreigners would consider) cute design elements. Cute factor works in Korea. I think it works well with most Asian countries. I just hope they won’t just add cutesy icons like their Google Korea site?

I still think many companies are still stuck with the idea of translating a site is all that’s needed for localization, that is called translation. Sometimes, you need to step out of the corporate or standard look and feel, make adjustments to Jakob Nielson’s usability guidelines, and design specifically for the market, that’s localization. CenterNetworks has a great read on YouTube and localization.