HYBE Corporation, the company behind K-Pop megastars BTS, understands the business of fandom. And that’s perhaps why their “global fandom life platform” project, Weverse, feels so compelling. Envisioned as neither a social network nor a private fan club, HYBE is trying to create a “super app” that would allow artists to post, live stream, host concerts, sell official merchandise and more in a single online ecosystem.
Thanks to HYBE’s ambitious global expansion, including its acquisition of Ithaca Holdings (home to Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande), its merger with former industry live streaming leader VLive, and partnerships with Universal Music Group and South Korean competitor SM Entertainment, Weverse hosts 86 artists and actors.
Those public figures can post text messages, photos, and videos, live stream, host concerts, and sell official merchandise — all within the Weverse ecosystem — to more than 65 million users, 10 million of which are active on a monthly basis.
A streamlined fandom platform of that size has never existed before. On services like Twitter, YouTube, or Tumblr, fan-artist communication is a byproduct of a what are essentially blogging utilities. On Weverse, building experiences that connect artists with their fans — and monetizing those interactions — is the point. The platform takes its inspiration from the Korean music industry, which lives and dies by fan engagement. And no one understands that better than HYBE.
Joon Won Choi is Weverse’s President. Before joining the company in 2021, Choi held executive roles at video game companies NCSOFT and Nexon, and Pinkfong, the children’s content giant best known for Baby Shark. This despite studying history at Seoul’s Yonsei University, where he wrote his thesis on the French Revolution. “I spent more time with engineering majors than history ones” Choi laughs over a Zoom call from Pangyo Techno Village, an office park outcrop that her likens to South Korea’s Silicon Valley. Since his college says “almost everything I’ve done has been about building tech platforms and content companies,” he says. That content may have differed, “but the fundamental part of my job — thinking about boring technological things like account systems and security, how to handle traffic from all around the world, and regulation compliance — are essential for any kind of platform. They’re things that should be prepared for users [so] that they only see the fancy cover of [a product].”
Choi spoke to Mashable about how Weverse intends to better the fandom business, the challenges of moderation at scale, artificial intelligence, and more.
Mashable: In a recent interview with CNN, HYBE Chairman Bang Si-Hyuk, stated “K-pop is not as hot in the market as you might perceive… Looking at our export indicators and streaming growth, the slowdown in growth is very clear.” To me, it seems that while K-pop may be selling less, when it comes to merchandising or fan engagement, K-pop has always been a strong market. Is that the case?
Joon Won Choi: Thank you for saying that, I feel the same. Chairman Bang is obviously right when we see the latest numbers from certain sources but there are [different statistics] Weverse monitors. One good indicator of growth is how many users are [following multiple artists on Weverse] and that number only goes up. That’s the trend we’ve been witnessing: overall activity, engagement, and visit frequency only go up.
Si-Hyuk also noted that he would have a stronger hand in guiding HYBE’s “labels and management companies in America” as a means to further globalize and “increase the exposure” of K-pop. What is Weverse’s role in that?
We don’t limit our boundaries or fandom only within K-pop. We call our service a “fandom business,” and you can be a fan of anything. The thing we’re really digging into is the psychological mechanism of falling in love with something or someone.
When there’s a fan that’s passionate about something or someone, we understand what they want and provide them an all-in-one package. For artists, we are the best tool for cultivating their super fans and we provide a monetization ecosystem.
Do you study that “psychological mechanism” of fandom as you develop the app and create new features?
I’m very happy to say that now we are at the stage of doing that. When Weverse launched in June 2019, a group of 30 talented people got together to build the minimum viable product and when they released it. The traffic went up like this [makes a swift upward motion with his hand]. We have had to measure, fix, release, and iterate over and over in a very short timeframe. The platform has never been perfect compared to what we really wanted to deliver. We know what fans want but are still behind that and have tried very hard to catch up the last three years. Now Weverse has more than 350 employees in Pangyo, Santa Monica, Tokyo, and Vietnam. We have so many priorities that feel obvious, that don’t need data to back it up. The big example is combining Weverse and [separate app] Weverse Shop.
I will say it’s one of my biggest pet peeves is that I have to go to a separate app to shop.
See, you know about it, right? It’s obvious, you don’t need analytic experts to tell you that. Once those are combined, we can talk about the user acquisition funnel and investing in the psychological aspects of monitoring user behavior across different regions, languages, or genres of music.
On the topic of consolidation; most K-pop group’s have a branded light stick that syncs via bluetooth to its own app. Will you eventually add that capability to Weverse so a separate app is not needed?
We are working adding that option, but the decision will lie with the artist and label. That kind of feature will be a benefit of the consolidation. Another example is a feature we tested during a recent showcase by the girl group Billlie. We added a small ticker to the screen to encourage fans to buy their album through Weverse. We plan to provide more customization like that on the artist side: if you want to monetize you can, but if not, you don’t have to.
Twitter used to be a place to go and hear from artists and know it was actually them tweeting because their account had been verified. Now that verification is paid, that is no longer the case. Does that give Weverse a stronger position in the market as a verified fan-artist interaction platform?
Everyone asks me the same questions: “when will Justin Bieber join Weverse?” I’ve been hearing that question for the last year, since we purchased Ithaca Holdings.
Weverse is not the right platform for every artist, because they each have their preferred way of communicating with their fan base. K-pop artists feel that they’re in a very safe and secure environment on Weverse, so their behavior when they post something on Instagram versus when they post on Weverse is completely different and the reaction is also very different.
We are focusing on creating a more secure environment for artists. When Weverse started, a profanity filter and other security features weren’t at the top of the list. But as the service grows, that priority does, too. That was one of the many benefits of partnering with Naver, a big tech giant in Korea. They invest hugely in machine learning and AI community moderation technology, now we are using their tech to moderate video and photo posts and using a clean-text bot [to filter profanity].
They can never be perfect, but thanks to the support from machine learning, it only gets better. So implementing those kinds of systems has been a big improvement and are other measures we’re working on to keep the Weverse environment safe and secure.
In the past I’ve written about racism on Weverse, which can be overt or more subtly rooted in ignorance. What focus are you taking on racist comment, or comments about race and identity, as the user base grows more diverse?
I think this is the most difficult question. Weverse has more than 65 million users in 245 countries, so we have huge traffic coming through and there are many, as you mentioned, comments containing racism, prejudices, or biases. It’s quite difficult to detect every one of them because of the huge amount of traffic coming in, so that is the challenge that we’re facing right now.
We cannot 100% rely on technology, so we have an operations and monitoring team of human eyes. We also listen to the community, because sometimes getting info from them is faster than the internal monitoring system. We also take legal action against those abusers. So we have different measures and are trying to make it more comprehensive.
I repeat this very often in the office: we have almost 10 million active users every month, and only around 10% of them speak Korean. In terms of where the app has the most users, countries like Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, the U.S., and Mexico are at the top of the list. The fastest growth we’ve been seeing is in India. So the Weverse team should be at the forefront of embracing all the different cultures and understanding them.
You just announced feature called “Weverse DM.” It’s not clear to me exactly how it works. If I write a DM to an artist, will they write me back directly?
The message is really from the artist, but it’s not guaranteed to be personally directed to you. The interesting part of the service is that fans know that, and they still enjoy it. From the artist’s perspective, the DMs look like a live chat that they can read to decide the best message to deliver to fans.
We developed Weverse DM to be a part of a subscription model we’re developing for later this year. But the needs and requests of each label are different, so whether it is a separate paid feature or not will depend on the preference of each artist.
There’s only one Justin Bieber and millions of fans, so scalability is a huge factor in building a fandom. The DM feature is a good example of solving that “one to many” dilemma: an artist cannot DM every single person, but there’s a version of a DM that still enables fans to feel like there’s a connection. Are there other difficulties that you’ve encountered around scalability?
I’ve been getting the same kind of question about Weverse DM, mostly from people I met in the States. “Is it really from the artist?” Yes, it is. We never consider AI generated comments or messages. The core of our service is the real interaction between fan and artist, so if even one message is generated from a computer, that’s a huge risk to the core of our business. Our focus is on developing better tools for artists to easily monitor and moderate the conversation.
Are you investing heavily in AI beyond your partnership with Naver? AI is all we talk about at work now, to be honest.
Same here! We are not investing in AI, [but] we incorporate it into what we’re doing in the office. The benefit we observe from it so far is about internal workflow efficiency. I mean, we’re crazy about it.
Can you give me an example of what you’re using it for?
[Laughs] Summarizing a five page report? Generating a do to list out of it? Stuff like that. It can create a very good draft version of something. We go through it and say “oh, this is wrong, this is wrong, but the overall narrative of this makes a lot of sense!” We use it as a seed of brainstorming.
HYBE has said that it’s taking measures to become more sustainable in providing digital versions of items. The “Weverse Album” feature offers digital version of albums, photo cards, and photo books. In considering the value of an object, I think people still attribute more value to something physical. How do you approach creating value around digital goods and are you investing in that kind of technology?
We are. We stealth launched a service called Weverse Collection earlier this year that involves earning badge from your fan activity. That’s the beginning of digital items within Weverse and the evolution of that goes in the direction of what you just mentioned. The value of digital and physical photo cards complement each other. When it comes to the environment and the very core of desire of fans, we think eventually it won’t really matter whether value exists in the physical world or virtual world. And so while offering digital goods might be one way of achieving ESG [environmental, social, and governance] compliance, we don’t think that digital value will completely replace physical goods.
[We want them to] complement each other or maximize the usage of each other. In the industry, we already see examples of interactive photo cards, where you take a picture of that physical photo card and can see exclusive AR content. That’s cool, there’s a “wow” factor in that. But is that really what fans want? Will they really enjoy the AR content enough to view it repeatedly? That’s where our research in psychology or user behavior comes in. It will help us develop the best experiences, not just provide something that looks cool.
Would Weverse ever consider entering the secondary photocard market by providing a marketplace for trading and resale?
I cannot specifically answer that the question, but I can talk about the direction of what we are doing. We’ll be launching a new service called “Weverse by Fans,” where fans can customize their own goods. After we consolidate all of Weverse’s features within a super app, the next journey would be providing more features encouraging fan-to-fan interaction. We feel that’s very important.
You’re hosting Weverse Con Festival, a multi-day in-person concert in June. Last year it was a virtual event. What’s the strategy behind having an in person event, especially for an app?
Weverse Con Festival is the best opportunity for us to showcase how we can connect the online and offline experience. We put a lot of emphasis on Weverse Con Festival because we believe the features we’re providing there could be used by different artists around the world to [connect with] their fans online, help them join the concert, and have a seamless experience. That’s our larger goal.
