Naver Real Estate Blocks OpenAI: A Signal for Data Monetization in the AI Era?

Naver has completely blocked global AI companies, including OpenAI, from crawling data on its core platforms such as 'Naver Real Estate'. This move is interpreted as a full-scale effort to prevent generative AIs like ChatGPT from 'free-riding' by unauthorizedly training on Naver's massive datasets, and to demand fair valuation for high-quality data.

Complete Block of AI Bots: 3 Key Reasons

Recently, Naver uniformly applied codes in its 'robots.txt' files to explicitly prohibit access by specific AI crawlers (like GPTBot). The background for this measure can be summarized into three key points:

• Protection of High-Quality Data: It prevents databases built at an enormous cost, such as real estate listings, from being given away for free as training data for foreign AIs.
• Platform Traffic Defense: If AI summarizes Naver's data and provides direct answers, user traffic to Naver's sites will decrease, which could deal a blow to its core revenue models like search advertising.
• Prevention of Server Overload: It preemptively blocks server overloads caused by indiscriminate crawling by AI bots worldwide.

A Signal for Data Monetization? Future IT Market Outlook

Naver's strong response signifies the arrival of the 'data monetization' era in the AI ecosystem. Major foreign media outlets like The New York Times (NYT) have already filed copyright infringement lawsuits against OpenAI, and global communities like Reddit are signing data licensing contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with AI companies. Naver, which possesses the highest level of local data in Korea, is analyzed to have adopted a 'block first, negotiate later' strategy to gain an upper hand in future data provision negotiations with AI companies.

Related FAQ

Q. Was the information I posted on Naver Real Estate trained by AI?

Previously, it is highly likely that AI crawlers randomly collected and trained on information publicly available on the web. However, following this blocking measure, it is technically blocked for ChatGPT and others to collect real-time Naver Real Estate data and use it for their answers.

Q. What is the impact of this measure on Naver's stock price?

As platform competitiveness and the value of exclusive data are highlighted, positive evaluations prevail in the long run. This is because a new business model of generating revenue from fair data usage fees could become visible.