In a post-pandemic world, healthcare is no longer just about treatment — it's about prevention and ongoing management. DoctorNow, which started with the mission "We save lives, every single day," has been evolving into a platform built around the full healthcare journey: helping people live healthier, happier lives. As DoctorNow expands from a vertical service into a true platform, it needed two things in place:
(1) The ability to serve different user intents — acute illness care, chronic disease management, everyday prevention — in a single product.
(2) A deep enough content pool to back up each of those intents.
The ad business DoctorNow launched with AdControl targets exactly that intersection. We sat down with Yu Su-jae, who leads DoctorNow's ads and partnerships, to hear where the company is headed as a healthcare media platform.
DoctorNow: a healthcare platform that saves lives every day
Could you start with a quick introduction to DoctorNow?
DoctorNow is Korea's #1 telemedicine company and the first startup in the country to deliver prescription medications. We started with a simple goal: make healthcare radically more accessible. Post-pandemic, we've gone beyond remote consultations to expand into prevention and management — with health magazines, AI-powered consultations, and more. Today, 94% of our 6.5 million monthly visits come in through health-related keywords, which makes us a deeply health-focused, high-intent platform.
People often describe DoctorNow as a vertical healthcare app. Do you see it that way?
A lot of people do, but I see it a little differently. Health and medical services aren't one vertical — they're really a collection of many verticals. Colds, diabetes, hair loss, weight management — each symptom and condition has its own distinct user needs. Add them all together and it might look general, but at the level of any individual user, it's deeply specific. So I'd describe DoctorNow as a platform that holds many healthcare verticals at once, not a single vertical product.
A meeting point for high-intent health users and the brands that want to reach them
What was the first thing you considered when launching the ad business?
We knew telemedicine alone had limits post-pandemic. Most of our traffic is highly engaged with their own health, which made us a strong fit for advertisers in functional foods, insurance, and pharmaceuticals. Contextual targeting tied to symptom and condition pages stood out as the key piece — the place where the advertiser's intent and the user's intent line up naturally.
Was there concern about ads hurting the user experience?
Absolutely — it was front of mind when we were deciding whether to launch ads at all. Our users come to us for health information, so an irrelevant ad or a piece of misleading advertising next to that content could undermine the trust DoctorNow has built. The real question was where and how the ads show up. A diet-related ad placed below a diet-related consultation, for example, doesn't feel like an interruption — it feels like useful information. That kind of contextual fit is what convinced us that targeted advertising could genuinely benefit both the business and our users.
We've heard DoctorNow's ad inventory has some unique characteristics compared to other healthcare ad products.
The biggest differentiator is that we can segment by all the distinct stakeholders in healthcare, and we can target interests at the level of specific diseases and symptoms. DoctorNow brings general users, doctors, and pharmacists onto one platform. We run separate ad inventory for each — the user app and web, the doctor web, and the pharmacist web — so advertisers can pick the audience that matches their campaign goal. The user web supports targeting by disease and medical specialty. The user app reaches people who are highly engaged with health and spend significant time in-product. The doctor/pharmacist web lets you reach medical professionals directly. AdControl's contextual targeting is the engine that makes all of this work.
Targeting and operational efficiency we couldn't get before — thanks to AdControl
What was the hardest part of leading the ad operation solo?
When we first launched ads, my biggest concern was running ad operations across 6.5 million monthly visits by myself. Managing every creative manually while also looking out for the advertiser's experience just isn't realistic at that scale. The thing AdControl changed most was operational efficiency. Advertisers and agencies can book and pay directly through a link, and inventory syncs automatically. Real-time creative management plus a buyer-friendly flow took a huge load off our business team and let us scale operations far more efficiently.
We heard you're planning to lean heavily on AdControl's contextual targeting.
Given how DoctorNow's pages are structured, the user visiting a particular page is almost by definition someone with high interest in the disease or health topic that page covers. With AdControl, syncing the Category lets us split user segments by page, so we can serve a specific ad to people with a specific disease interest or health concern. We could've built that ourselves, but the simplicity of just plugging in via SDK was a big draw.
Where would you like to take DoctorNow next?
Telemedicine stays at the core, but we want to expand into a full healthcare platform that also covers prevention and management. The goal isn't just to be a medical intermediary — it's to be the medium that solves user problems across their whole healthcare life.
DoctorNow is reaching beyond telemedicine toward a healthcare platform that supports the entire user journey. And advertising, in their world, isn't just a revenue line — it's a meaningful connection point that brings the right solution to the user and a real opportunity to the advertiser. Starting from "a platform that saves lives," the team is now building the place where advertising and healthcare meet on natural terms. The next chapter of their growth story is one we're watching closely.
Efficient ad operations, starting with AdControl
If you want to combine precise contextual targeting and efficient operations the way DoctorNow does:
- Context-based targeting: serve the right ad to users in the right moment of intent
- Saved operational resources: one link from advertiser booking to performance reporting
