Platform guide

How to Advertise on Kakao: Bizboard, Moment & KakaoTalk Costs

An independent guide to Kakao advertising in South Korea: Kakao Moment, the Bizboard chat-tab banner, guaranteed CPT rate cards, KakaoTalk Channel messaging, targeting, and how a foreign advertiser actually opens an account.

Most advertising platforms have to buy their way to reach. Kakao does not. KakaoTalk is the messaging layer of South Korean daily life, and its advertising inventory sits inside the app people open to talk to their family. DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report for South Korea counted 49.1 million KakaoTalk monthly active users in the country, equivalent to about 95.1 percent of the total population and about 97.1 percent of the country’s internet users. Kakao’s own Q2 2026 results put Korea monthly active users at 49.6 million and global at 55.3 million.

That single fact sets the strategic frame. In Korea, Naver is where intent is expressed and captured, and Kakao is where the population already is. This guide covers the Kakao side: what Kakao Moment actually buys, how the Bizboard chat-tab banner works and what the guaranteed placements around it cost, how paid messaging to your own channel audience is priced, what the targeting data looks like, and the account and verification steps a foreign advertiser has to clear first. For the search and intent half of a Korea plan, see the Naver guide. For the market itself, population, media mix and regulation, the South Korea market guide is the background this page deliberately does not repeat.

49.1M
KakaoTalk monthly active users in Korea, DataReportal 2026
95.1%
Of the South Korean population, DataReportal 2026
50,000 KRW
Minimum campaign daily budget, Kakao Moment

What Kakao Moment is and what it buys

Kakao Moment is the self-serve buying platform. It is the place you create an ad account, connect measurement, fund a wallet, and build campaigns, ad groups and creative. Kakao’s documentation describes the setup as six steps: create an ad account, connect pixels and SDKs, create or connect a Biz Wallet, then build campaign, ad group and creative in that order.

The inventory it reaches is much wider than KakaoTalk alone. Display ad groups can be pointed at four placement families: KakaoTalk itself, the Daum portal, other Kakao services including KakaoPay, KakaoPage, KakaoMap, KakaoBank, KakaoT, KakaoBus, KakaoSubway and KakaoNavi, and an external partner network. Kakao Moment splits its products into three buying modes, and the distinction matters more here than on most platforms:

Performance products are the auction. Bizboard, display, video and catalogue ads, bought on CPM, CPC or CPA against a daily budget.

Guaranteed products are the reservation. Bizboard CPT, Focus Board, Rich Pop All Day, Profile Full View and the KakaoTalk Gift Home slot, all sold as fixed time blocks at a published or negotiated slot price, with no targeting.

Message products are the owned-audience channel. KakaoTalk Channel messages, personalised messages and brand messages, billed per send.

Most foreign advertisers arrive expecting only the first of those, and then discover that the placements Korean buyers actually talk about live in the second and third.

Kakao Bizboard: the chat-tab banner

Bizboard is the banner at the top of the KakaoTalk chat list. It has no clean Western equivalent, which is why it is the placement buyers ask about first. It is not a feed unit and not an interstitial: it is a persistent strip at the top of the surface a Korean user opens dozens of times a day.

Kakao’s creative guide defines the unit tightly. The base asset is 1029 by 258 pixels, PNG-24 or PNG-32, under 300KB, built on a transparent background. Four banner constructions are supported: object type, thumbnail type, masking type and text type, each with its own layout rules for the image area, and Kakao specifies the copy treatment down to point size and hex value, with main copy at 48pt in #4C4C4C and sub copy at 39pt in #777777. Main and sub copy cannot be identical strings, a set of emoji and decorative symbols is banned outright, and the advertiser has to be identifiable in either the copy or the object. This is a far more prescriptive creative spec than Meta or Google impose, and it is the most common reason a first Korean flight slips.

As a biddable product, Bizboard runs three campaign objectives: reach, visit and conversion. Reach is manual CPM only. Visit supports automatic bidding on clicks or manual CPC or CPM. Conversion defaults to automatic bidding on CPA or value, with manual CPA, CPC or CPM available only for KakaoTalk channel friend-add conversions. Campaign daily budget runs from 50,000 KRW to 1 billion KRW in 10 KRW steps, set inclusive of VAT at campaign level, and for reach campaigns the bid is capped at the lower of half the ad group daily budget or 100,000 KRW. The same 50,000 KRW floor applies to display ad groups. For sourced cost context against these mechanics, see the Kakao benchmarks for South Korea and the wider Kakao benchmark hub.

The guaranteed placements, and what Kakao publishes

The reserved side of Kakao is where the interesting pricing lives, because Kakao publishes real rate cards for several of these products. That is unusual, and it is worth using.

Bizboard CPT sells the friends tab. Ten slots a day, two hours each as standard and four hours for the late-night block, no targeting, unlimited creatives in random rotation. Booking opens six weeks before exposure in week-long Monday to Sunday blocks, released every Monday at 10:00 Korean time, and allocated first-come, first-served: an ad group can be created against an unsold slot right up to 61 minutes before exposure, and cancelled up to 30 minutes before. Cancellation penalties escalate steeply, at 10 percent of the slot price within 20 business days of the flight, 20 percent within 5 business days, 40 percent within 1, and 100 percent on the day. The slot rate card itself is published only as an image in the booking guide, described as a discounted list card applying to slots exposed between 1 January and 31 December 2026, so a buyer has to confirm the current figure with Kakao rather than read it off the page.

Focus Board is the fixed strip at the bottom of the Windows KakaoTalk desktop client, a surface the user cannot close or pause. Here Kakao does publish the numbers, and they are instructive. On weekdays the 14:00 to 16:00 slot lists at 15,000,000 KRW against an average 28.7 million impressions, while the 04:00 to 08:00 block lists at 1,500,000 KRW against 2.1 million. On weekends and holidays the same 14:00 to 16:00 block lists at 2,500,000 KRW against 4.6 million impressions. Kakao is explicit that impressions are averages rather than guarantees.

Rich Pop All Day is the floating pop-up at the bottom right of the desktop client on login, sold as a full 24-hour block at 20,000,000 KRW on weekdays and 10,000,000 KRW on weekends and holidays, against average impressions of 7.5 million and 3.9 million respectively.

Profile Full View is the full-screen unit on the mobile friends tab, listed at 35,000,000 KRW against an average 2.5 million impressions.

The KakaoTalk Gift Home CPT slot sells the gifting home screen in twelve one-hour slots between 09:00 and 21:00, listed from 1,200,000 to 1,500,000 KRW in normal periods and 1,700,000 to 2,000,000 KRW in peak season. It is a commerce placement, and landing is restricted to Gift or Kakao Shopping Live.

Do the arithmetic

Published slot prices hide a much flatter effective CPM

Divide the published Focus Board rates by the published average impressions and the spread collapses. The weekday 14:00 to 16:00 slot works out at roughly 520 KRW per thousand impressions; the weekday 04:00 to 08:00 slot, which costs a tenth as much, works out at roughly 715 KRW. The cheapest effective rate on the card is the weekend late-night block at around 340 KRW. So a slot price that varies more than twenty-fold across the card translates into an effective CPM that varies roughly two-fold, and the cheap-looking overnight slots are among the worst value per impression. Rich Pop All Day sits near 2,600 KRW effective CPM and Profile Full View near 14,000 KRW, which is the premium for a full-screen takeover rather than a strip. All of this is arithmetic on Kakao’s own published figures, which the platform labels as averages, not guarantees. Our sourcing rules are in the methodology.

KakaoTalk Channel: paid access to an owned audience

A KakaoTalk Channel is free to create and functions as a business home inside KakaoTalk, with 1:1 chat, posts, coupons, chatbot connection and store listings. The paid layer is messaging, and it behaves unlike anything in a Western stack because the message arrives in the same chat list as a note from a friend.

Pricing is per send on a CPMS basis. Standard channel messages to channel friends are 15 KRW per send excluding VAT, rising to 20 KRW if any targeting is applied or the smart message format is used. Personalised messages, fired by a customer event through Kakao’s API rather than scheduled, are 25 to 30 KRW depending on message type, and Kakao positions them as cheaper than routing the same job through a marketing solution vendor. Brand messages, in limited testing at the time of writing, extend reach beyond channel friends to any user who consented to receive commercial information, require a business-verified channel, and are listed at 20 KRW for channel friends and a promotional 30 KRW for non-friends against a 40 KRW list price.

The compliance layer is real. Korea’s Network Act blocks commercial message sends to Korean users between 20:55 and 08:00, Kakao enforces this in the product, and undelivered messages queue for a batch send at 08:00. Overseas users are not subject to the window. When a message is flagged as commercial, Kakao automatically prefixes the sender name with (광고) and appends opt-out instructions, and its operations guide is unusually direct that dressing a promotion up as a service notice, for example appending discounted product lines to a delivery confirmation, counts as a labelling violation.

Targeting and Kakao’s audience data

Kakao Moment builds targeting from demographics combined with custom audiences. The documentation describes fifteen target types, a cap of 50 audiences per account and 50 ad groups linked per audience, with adult-targeted campaigns restricted to audiences aged 20 and over.

Three mechanisms do most of the work. Ad response targets rebuild audiences from click, video play, conversion and view data across all campaign types, with a default 90-day collection window and a population count available within about an hour of creation. Customer files accept advertiser-held ADID lists by file or URL, with the population extracted within an hour, matched against users who visited a Kakao ad surface in the last 180 days. Friend groups are specific to KakaoTalk Channel reach campaigns and let you target by phone number, app user ID or prior message recipients.

What Kakao does not offer, in practice, is the granular interest and behavioural graph a buyer might expect from a company that also runs Korea’s dominant taxi, map and payment apps. Plan on first-party data and ad-response retargeting carrying the campaign, not on Kakao’s native segments.

Daum and Kakao’s search ads

Kakao owns the Daum portal, and Kakao Keyword Advertising is its CPC search product. Ads run in the Premium Link area, with up to ten positions on Daum PC integrated search, up to six on Daum mobile search, and additional placement in the hashtag search results inside KakaoTalk chat rooms, plus PC and mobile content placements keyed to what a user searched or consumed across Kakao services. Billing is click-only, with position determined by bid and a quality index rather than bid alone.

Daum is not Naver, and pretending otherwise wastes budget. Treat Kakao Keyword Advertising as incremental search coverage on top of a Naver-led search plan, not as the search plan. The intent half of a Korea buy belongs on the Naver side, with cost context at Naver benchmarks for South Korea. Google and YouTube also carry real Korean reach, particularly among younger audiences and in video, so Google Ads benchmarks for South Korea and YouTube benchmarks for South Korea belong in the same planning view.

Account setup and business verification for a foreign advertiser

This is where most foreign Kakao plans stall, and the rules are specific.

Kakao Moment identifies the advertiser behind an ad account by business registration number. Domestic Korean businesses enter a 사업자등록번호. Domestic individuals can select “no business registration number”, but must pass a one-time identity verification and cannot transfer the account to anyone else. Overseas businesses use a D-U-N-S number, and Kakao states that if you are not yet registered you must complete D-U-N-S registration before you can use the account.

The trap is that Kakao does not allow a business registration number to be added after the ad account has been created. A foreign team that opens an account on a personal Kakao login to have a look around has permanently created the wrong kind of account. This is not cosmetic: Kakao’s lead-generation products are explicitly limited to accounts carrying either a domestic business registration number or an overseas D-U-N-S, and brand messaging requires a business-verified KakaoTalk Channel.

Funding runs through Biz Wallet, Kakao’s integrated business wallet, with ad cash drawn down as campaigns deliver. For guaranteed CPT products the contract amount is deducted from ad cash up front on purchase confirmation, then consumed daily once exposure starts, so a reserved buy needs the money in the wallet before the slot is claimed, not before it runs.

Watch-outs

What catches foreign buyers on Kakao

  1. Creating the ad account on the wrong identifier. The business registration number or D-U-N-S cannot be added later. Get the D-U-N-S issued before anyone logs in and clicks create, or you will be rebuilding the account and its history from scratch.
  2. Treating Bizboard creative as a resize job. The 1029 by 258 transparent PNG under 300KB, the fixed point sizes and hex values for main and sub copy, the ban on identical main and sub strings, and the mandatory advertiser identification are all rejection grounds. Budget a Korean design pass, not a translation pass.
  3. Reading guaranteed slot prices without dividing by impressions. The cheap overnight Focus Board slots are among the worst value per impression on the published card. Effective CPM, not slot price, is the comparison that means anything.
  4. Booking CPT late. Slots open six weeks ahead every Monday at 10:00 and go first-come, first-served, and cancellation costs 40 percent inside one business day and 100 percent on the day. A reserved Kakao buy is a calendar commitment, not a flexible line.
  5. Planning overnight message sends. Commercial messages to Korean users are blocked between 20:55 and 08:00 and queue to the morning, which quietly destroys any campaign built around a midnight drop.
  6. Assuming Kakao replaces Naver. Kakao is reach and owned-audience messaging. Search intent lives elsewhere, and a Kakao-only plan tends to generate awareness that a competitor converts.

Measurement, and the categories Kakao will not run

Kakao’s measurement stack is more complete than its reputation suggests. Kakao Pixel and SDK handle web and app conversion tracking, with a Pixel Helper for debugging, a Kakao Click ID (kclid) for click-level attribution, a server-side Conversion API, modelled conversions to fill gaps where direct measurement is unavailable, and SKAdNetwork support for iOS app campaigns. Video view counts from Moment campaigns can be linked back to KakaoTV view counts, though only by raising a request rather than through a toggle.

On eligibility, Kakao’s restricted industry list bars tobacco and e-cigarette sales, with device brand promotion allowed only in limited form; adult content and services that route to it; the regulated gambling sector, covering casinos, horse racing, lotteries, sports betting pools and bullfighting; unlicensed deposit-taking and guaranteed-return investment schemes; partisan and one-sided opinion advertising; religious promotion and proselytising; and a catch-all group including surveillance tools, fortune-telling services, dating services, motels, academic ghostwriting and illegal lending. Financial and investment claims are policed hard in messaging in particular.

What Kakao actually costs, honestly

Kakao is one of the few large platforms that publishes real rate cards, and it publishes them unevenly. For Focus Board, Rich Pop All Day, Profile Full View and the Gift Home slot, the list price and the average impression count are both on the page, which is more than Meta, Google or TikTok will give you. For Bizboard CPT, the headline product, the 2026 card is published as an image and carries an explicit instruction to confirm the figure with Kakao, so any number quoted for a Bizboard CPT slot without that confirmation is someone’s guess.

On the auction side there is no published price at all, and there cannot be. Kakao states plainly that the clearing price is computed in real time from billing method, bid and ad response rate, exactly as every auction platform does. What is knowable is the shape of the floor: 50,000 KRW minimum campaign daily budget, 10 KRW bid increments, reach bids capped at the lower of half the ad group daily budget or 100,000 KRW. Anything beyond that is a benchmark question rather than a rate-card question, which is why we publish it as dated, sourced data at Kakao benchmarks for South Korea rather than asserting a number here. Offline context for the same market sits at TV advertising costs in South Korea and out-of-home costs in South Korea, and the full dataset is at benchmarks.

Sources
  1. DataReportal, Digital 2026: South Korea (KakaoTalk MAU 49.1 million, 95.1 percent of population, 97.1 percent of internet users).
  2. Kakao Corp Investor Relations, earnings releases and Kakao Q2 2026 results coverage (Korea MAU 49.6 million, global MAU 55.3 million, Q2 2026).
  3. 카카오모먼트 시작하기 / 광고계정 만들기, Kakao Business Guide (business registration number, D-U-N-S for overseas advertisers, no retroactive addition, identity verification).
  4. 카카오 비즈보드 (MO), Kakao Business Guide (banner types, placement across KakaoTalk, Daum, Kakao services and network).
  5. 카카오 비즈보드 캠페인/광고그룹 만들기, Kakao Business Guide (objectives, bidding methods, 50,000 KRW to 1 billion KRW daily budget, 10 KRW increments, reach bid cap).
  6. 카카오 비즈보드 제작 가이드, Kakao Business Guide (1029 x 258 px, PNG-24/32, under 300KB, copy point sizes and hex values, advertiser identification).
  7. 디스플레이 광고 캠페인/광고그룹 만들기, Kakao Business Guide (placements, objectives, daily budget floor).
  8. 카카오 비즈보드 CPT, Kakao Business Guide (10 slots per day, 2-hour and 4-hour blocks, friends tab, no targeting).
  9. 카카오 비즈보드 CPT 집행 프로세스 및 단가, Kakao Business Guide (booking opens six weeks ahead Mondays at 10:00, 61-minute and 30-minute cutoffs, cancellation penalty schedule, 2026 rate card published as an image).
  10. 포커스 보드, Kakao Business Guide (weekday and weekend CPT rate card and average impressions).
  11. 리치팝 올데이 (PC), Kakao Business Guide (20,000,000 KRW weekday, 10,000,000 KRW weekend, average impressions).
  12. 프로필 풀뷰 (MO), Kakao Business Guide (35,000,000 KRW, 2.5 million average impressions).
  13. 카카오 비즈보드 CPT (MO), 선물하기 홈, Kakao Business Guide (12 hourly slots 09:00 to 21:00, normal and peak-season rates).
  14. 채널 메시지 광고그룹 만들기, Kakao Business Guide (CPMS, 15 KRW base, 20 KRW with targeting or smart message, VAT excluded).
  15. 개인화 메시지, Kakao Business Guide (25 to 30 KRW per send, API-triggered, comparison with channel messages).
  16. 브랜드 메시지, Kakao Business Guide (business-verified channel, consented non-friends, 20 KRW and promotional 30 KRW against 40 KRW list).
  17. 메시지 발송 설정, Kakao Business Guide (20:55 to 08:00 send restriction under the Network Act, batch send at 08:00, no restriction for overseas users).
  18. 메시지 광고 운영 가이드, Kakao Business Guide (mandatory (광고) prefix and opt-out, labelling violation examples).
  19. 타겟 관리, Kakao Business Guide (15 target types, 50-audience cap, ad response targets 90-day window, customer file ADID upload 180-day match, friend groups, 20-plus adult targeting).
  20. 참여형 광고, Kakao Business Guide (lead ads limited to accounts with a domestic business registration number or overseas D-U-N-S).
  21. 제한 업종, Kakao Business Guide (restricted and prohibited categories).
  22. Kakao 키워드광고, Kakao Business Guide (CPC billing, Premium Link positions on Daum PC and mobile, KakaoTalk hashtag search, content placements).
  23. 픽셀 & SDK, Kakao Business Guide (Kakao Pixel, Pixel Helper, kclid, Conversion API, modelled conversions).
  24. Cost benchmarks and sourcing policy: International Media Buying Methodology.

FAQ

What is Kakao Moment and how does it relate to Kakao Bizboard?
Kakao Moment is the self-serve buying platform, and Kakao Bizboard is the flagship ad format bought through it. Moment is where you create ad accounts, campaigns, ad groups and creative, and it handles Bizboard, display, video, catalogue, lead-generation and KakaoTalk Channel message ads. Bizboard is the banner that sits at the top of the KakaoTalk chat list and also runs across Daum, other Kakao services such as KakaoPay, KakaoMap and KakaoPage, and a network of partner sites. Kakao's own documentation treats them as platform and product rather than as competing systems.
What does Kakao Bizboard cost?
Two different answers, depending on which product you mean. The biddable Bizboard in Kakao Moment is an auction: you set a daily budget of at least 50,000 KRW per campaign, in 10 KRW steps up to 1 billion KRW, and pay on CPM, CPC or CPA depending on your objective. The guaranteed Bizboard CPT product sells fixed time slots on the KakaoTalk friends tab, ten slots a day, and Kakao publishes its 2026 rate card only as an image inside the booking guide, so the honest answer is that the slot price has to be confirmed with Kakao before you plan against it.
Can a foreign company open a Kakao ad account?
Yes, but the identifier matters. Kakao Moment identifies the advertiser behind an ad account by business registration number. Domestic Korean businesses supply a 사업자등록번호. Overseas businesses must instead supply a D-U-N-S number, the nine-digit international business identifier, and Kakao's documentation states you must complete D-U-N-S registration before you can use the account. The registration number cannot be added after the account exists, so a foreign advertiser who creates an account without one is stuck: some products, including Kakao's lead-generation ads, are restricted to accounts that carry a domestic number or a D-U-N-S.
How much does a KakaoTalk Channel message cost to send?
Channel messages are billed per send on a CPMS basis. Kakao's ad group documentation lists a base rate of 15 KRW per send excluding VAT, rising to 20 KRW per send if you apply any targeting or use a smart message. Personalised messages, triggered by a customer event through the API, run 25 to 30 KRW per send depending on message type. Brand messages, which reach users who consented to marketing rather than only channel friends, are listed at 20 KRW for channel friends and a promotional 30 KRW for non-friends against a 40 KRW list price.
When can you send KakaoTalk ad messages?
Not overnight. Under Korea's Network Act, Kakao blocks advertising message sends to Korean users between 20:55 and 08:00 the following morning. That window cannot be selected as a send time, and anything not dispatched by 20:55 is sent in a batch at 08:00. Overseas users have no send-time restriction. Separately, when a message is flagged as commercial in Kakao Moment or the Channel admin centre, Kakao automatically prefixes the sender profile name with (광고) and appends opt-out and consent-withdrawal instructions at the foot of the message.
Should you buy Kakao or Naver in Korea?
They answer different questions, so most serious Korea plans carry both. Naver is where Korean demand is expressed as a search query, which makes it the intent and capture layer. Kakao is where the population already is: DataReportal put KakaoTalk at 49.1 million monthly active users in South Korea, equivalent to about 95.1 percent of the population, which makes it the reach and messaging layer. Kakao also owns the Daum portal and runs its own CPC keyword product there, but Daum is the smaller search property. Treating Kakao as a Naver substitute usually under-delivers on both.

Free & sourced

What Kakao Ads actually costs

CPM and CPC trading ranges by market — sourced, dated, and free to cite.

See the cost benchmarks