Naver makes drastic changes to its article ranking system

Hi Navernatics,

We would like to share a drastic change that has been made by Naver regarding their ranking system.

Since April last year, Naver's news service has used an automatic recommendation model based on media subscription and personal consumption. According to Naver, they're making a transition to change their ranking system because the way users consume news has changed.

Currently, users read articles based on what's ranked in aggregate by Naver by topic. Naver is changing the ranking to be sorted by interest so that you're seeing articles from different media outlets focused on the specific issue that garners your interest. 

Below is a summary of changes being made by Naver:

1. Removing existing ranking service in the "Ranking" section where they rank articles topic i.e politics, social, life/culture, economy, etc. and by age (10s, 20s, 30s, 40s etc.). This is because they want to strengthen rankings for each media company.
2. The ranking homepage will show a collection of rankings my media company rather than ranking results compiled based on aggregate of articles from various media.
3. Rankings at the bottom of each article that were previously aggregated by the section the article was posted in are being removed in favor of a recommended area of "News to Watch Together." Basically articles everyone else that viewed the same article went on to read.
4. "Most Viewed" ranking that was previously compiled using views in aggregate is also being removed. Going forward, this ranking will be compiled based on views by media company. 

No changes were made to comment rankings by age i.e man/woman, 10s, 20s, 30s, 40s etc. (so far).

How does this affect the blog?

The article rankings on the sidebar of the main Naver news homepage that we used to determine articles for translations have been removed but search term rankings still remain so we'll use this for now.

No changes have been made to the entertainment section's rankings, at least so far. 

We will make adjustments as necessary once the new changes are available. Homepage changes are currently being implemented as of 10.23.2020 12:56am KST. 

We're hoping this new change still reflects the news and topics that Koreans truly care about.