Why messengers market will continue actively growing? Research of the advertising opportunities in instant messengers (part 3)

UMC
3 min readJul 20, 2018

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There are more than a thousand messengers with different functions, advertising opportunities and audience in the world. Nowadays, there are several undisputed leaders on the global messengers market: WhatsApp Messenger (Europe, India and Indonesia) and WeChat, Line, Kakaotalk, which is traditionally first in China, Japan and South Korea. It is noteworthy that in China and South Korea, leadership positions are occupied exclusively by local messengers. This is explained by the policy of protectionism, ie. protection of the domestic product from the influence of foreign companies.

We continue talking about the most popular instant messengers in the world and their advertising potential.

Line

Year of foundation: 2011

Monthly active audience: 217 million people (2017)

Line Messenger appeared after the earthquake in 2011, which severely damaged telecommunication networks in Asia. Line has been very popular in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia for more than seven years now. Among the available functions of the messenger — Line Points, Line games, Line accounts and private user chat rooms.

The advertising possibilities of Line are quite wide and consist of stickers for business; banner advertising; mailings from the corporate account; video advertising in the official Line account and even holding offline events. It is important to note that advertising is an important source of income of the messenger and every year its percentage in relation to all other sources is growing.

KakaoTalk

Year of foundation: 2010

Monthly active audience: 50.348 million

KakaoTalk is a popular instant messenger with a homogeneous audience: 93% of KakaoTalk users are South Koreans. Among available functions of the application are business accounts of Kakao Plus Friends, channels, forums (chat between groups of users with additional functions).

Advertising opportunities of KakaoTalk includes banners, pop-up messages, advertising inside the discussion. An interesting function is encouraging users to participate in advertising — each user receives a small reward for a useful action.

KIK

Year of foundation: 2010

Monthly active audience: 15 million users

KIK is a popular North American messenger (USA, Canada), which was created by a group of Canadian students and in a few months has gained immense popularity with a multi-million audience. The history of KIK is not easy, because it had serious legal issues with BlackBerry and RIM, which suspended the development of the messenger and its financing for several years. However, already in 2014, KIK has been at the center of attention of venture funds and investment companies. WeChat and QQ also planned to make KIK “WeChat of the West”. In 2017, at the peak of the popularity of ICOs, the messenger successfully conducted the crowdsdale and raised almost $ 100 million.

It is important to note that there are almost no advertising opportunities for the messenger. There are business accounts that are used by large companies and media in direct partnership with Kik.

Conclusions

In the modern world, blockchain technology is actively introduced into the messenger market. And it is not surprising, because blockchain makes this promising sphere more transparent, independent and fair. Today messengers are successfully used for business, advertising, negotiations. World opinion leaders and businessmen recognized that the potential of messengers is unlimited and every year it continues growing and developing.

Universal Marketing Company (UMC) platform is designed to manage paid content and create SMART-advertising in instant messengers. In particular, as a platform-aggregator, UMC is created to reduce the costs for managing, administering and promoting projects in instant messengers.

The UMC team is actively engaged in this task. Check the official website and the WP for the detailed description of the project. Nowadays there are the best conditions for supporting the project!

Check our website for more information: https://umccoin.io/

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