On October 7, Naver and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) announced that they will set up 'Naver cultural content fund' (tentative title) for the growth and vitalization of healthy ecosystem of cultural content and collaborate to actively support the content industry.

Back in July, Naver announced that it will support in building a productive cultural content ecosystem and signed an MOU with the Culture Ministry in August for its active promotion. This business project is a part of its plan. Naver will set up a KRW 50 billion fund and strive for improvement of local content production environment.

After holding negotiations, Naver and the MCST decided to actively support the following areas: Creating story content, creating knowledge content, digitizing content, and supporting small content providers.

Starting with discussion of support measures for overseas expansion of Korean cartoon and Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) as soon as possible, Naver and the MCST are expected to discuss other areas, like supporting content creators and digitizing content, more in detail.

"We hope this collaboration will create a new model for mutual cooperation between content providers and distributors in media convergence environment and create a healthy mutually growing ecosystem," said Song Soo-geun, a culture ministry official in charge of policies to promote the local content industry.

Han Sung-sook, a Naver Service executive, stated, "In order to expand the pool of local digital cultural content creators and improve quality of contents, Naver has been making all efforts such as implementation of Page Profit Share (PPS) program for webtoons, quality improvement of Naver Knowledge content, and renewal of ASEMUS (Asia-Europe Museum Network) website. By strengthening collaboration with the Culture Ministry, we will actively support the project for vitalization of ecosystem of local digital cultural content."