WebProNews

It hasn't had much success so far.  Yet Google seems determined to succeed in South Korea, and the next service to get launched in this market is YouTube.

Google Korea, if you'll recall, is one of the few versions of the search engine that deviates from a clean and simple homepage; instead, there are cartoonish pictures and animated pop-ups.  YouTube Korea doesn't appear to have anything out of the ordinary like that.

Its very existence is an oddity, though, given the facts relayed in The Korea Times.  Cho Jin-seo states, "The Korean YouTube site faces a daunting mission in competing against locally grown services from Daum, Pandora TV and Afreeca.  Tricky censorship regulations and skeptical sentiment toward foreign Internet firms will also become a hurdle to success for the U.S.-based site in Korea."

Mashable's Mark Hopkins, to whom I owe a hat tip, covered some similar sentiments.  Meanwhile, back in the U.S., Google's stock is being beaten to a ($550 per share) pulp, and at least one monitoring agency recorded a loss in the giant's share of the search market.  It's still better off than a lot of stuff out there, but things just haven't been going so well lately.