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Choi Soo-yeon (Photo: Yonhap News Agency) |
[Alpha Biz= Ellie Kim] Choi Soo-yeon, CEO of Naver, said artificial intelligence accounted for more than half of the company’s advertising revenue growth in the first quarter, highlighting AI as a key driver of future expansion.
Speaking during an earnings call on April 30, Choi said, “AI contributed over 50% of ad revenue growth in Q1,” adding that Naver plans to structurally advance its advertising business this year based on three core growth engines.
The first pillar is enhanced targeting. Naver is leveraging AI to optimize ad performance and improve effectiveness across its AdPost platform. The company is also integrating and refining data across its services to train a large-scale unified recommendation foundation model, aimed at improving content and ad relevance based on user context.
“The model will help elevate recommendation quality and improve prediction accuracy at both industry and placement levels, ultimately increasing advertising efficiency,” Choi said.
The second growth engine is monetization of generative AI services. Naver plans to roll out “AI briefing ads,” with testing set for the second quarter and full-scale monetization expected in the second half of the year. The company will gradually introduce the service starting with informational queries, while minimizing cannibalization of existing search ads.
The third pillar is expansion into external media platforms. Naver has been testing integrations with Meta since November and plans to expand partnerships to Criteo and Google in the second quarter.
Choi said this expansion is expected to strengthen advertiser lock-in and drive external traffic back into the Naver ecosystem.
Alphabiz Ellie Kim 인턴기자(press@alphabiz.co.kr)
