Fans Gather to Cheer and Discuss... Naver Sports Launches 'Open Talk' and 'Issue Talk' Communities

[Asia Economy Reporter Seungjin Lee] Naver announced on the 27th that it will embark on an experiment with a next-generation community where fans can cheer together and share stories centered around sports.

The newly launched community service operates as ▲‘Open Talk,’ where users can freely create chat rooms by favorite teams and have small group chats ▲‘Issue Talk,’ where anyone can share diverse opinions and discuss major sports issues.

Any sports fan can freely create an ‘Open Talk’ chat room that can accommodate up to 1,000 participants, and set various categories and keywords such as the KBO League, Premier League, V-League, and other sports. Within Open Talk, a ‘Watch Broadcast Together’ feature is provided, allowing fans to cheer together and enjoy sports games in real time.

The next-generation community service is characterized by significantly increasing user engagement through interest-based open chatting while maintaining the expertise inherent in the vertical service of ‘sports.’ In addition to real-time participation, it enables continuous and steady communication based on interests, offering features such as real-time voting and photo sharing, with plans to introduce various functions reflecting user feedback in the future. The company expects that sharing iconic moments during games among fans and quickly exchanging emotions about exciting and heartbreaking moments will greatly enhance immersion in sports.

Since the service opened on the 22nd, about 1,000 Open Talk chat rooms have been created in approximately five days on Naver Sports. ▲Various sports rooms are actively operated, including the Premier League, KBO, and K League, which are recently engaged in interesting ranking competitions, as well as winter sports like volleyball and basketball, and golf, which is popular among younger audiences.

‘Issue Talk’ provides related content such as articles, videos, and data on specific topics like ‘Federer Retirement,’ ‘Pujols 700 Home Runs,’ and ‘Marathon World Record,’ allowing users to share diverse opinions and also offers a voting feature. Through this, it plans to facilitate in-depth sharing of various opinions on specific sports topics and enable meaningful discussions.

Park Hyunjun, leader of Naver Sports, said, “The newly launched community service hopes to become a communication platform where many fans sharing the same interests gather and consume sports content in a new way,” adding, “We will continue various attempts to operate a healthy community where people can enjoy chatting and discussions centered on sports.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.