Why messengers market will continue actively growing? Research of the advertising opportunities in instant messengers (part 4)
Messengers became an essential part of our lives. They are used by people of all ages and professions, because it is a simple and fast way of communication. Messengers market is actively growing and developing; it has more and more functions and opportunities that attract representatives of business circles, financial sector and politics.
“The most popular apps that sustain themselves day after day, month after month, at the top of the leader board, are messengers. That’s a reflection of what people do on their phones. Once they become full-blown ‘portals’ for mobile content and mobile commerce, we will really see how massive this opportunity is,” said Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures and an investor in Kik, a messaging app popular with young users.
Skype
Year of foundation: 2003
Skype was created by Niklas Zennström in collaboration with a group of Estonian developers. In September 2005, eBay acquired all of the outstanding shares of privately-held Skype for a total up-front consideration of approximately €2.1 billion. In May 2011, Microsoft announced that it bought Skype Global for $8.5 billion in cash, in its largest acquisition ever.
Advertising opportunities of Skype: add-ons and bots. Microsoft announced updated Skype targeting features for work with advertisements in the audio chat window. A new vision will be very effective for projects that conduct money transfers, as well as for tour operators and air carriers.
“Skype is the most popular audio and video service in the world. It is used by more than 330 million people from 73 countries. We try to maximize the full potential of the product in advertising solutions. We are confident that the ability to target users on a country-by-country basis will be extremely relevant for travel, money transfers and other industries related to such a solution”,
Dobrynya Gutiev, head of promotion of digital advertising and online services Microsoft.
Snapchat
Year of foundation: 2011 (originally named Pikaboo)
Monthly active audience: 370 million
Since its creation, Snapchat has been actively developing its potential and became popular in North America, Europe and Asia. The idea to make “fast photos and videos” was appreciated by adults and children. One year after the launch of the app, users shared more than one billion photos per day. In June 2013, Snapchat introduced Snapkids, an add-on for users under the age of 13.
Advertising opportunities of Snapchat are quite broad. Businesses successfully use advertising stories — short videos from brands, from 3 to 10 seconds long with a link to the site; app store; branded filters for stories or animated masks.
The main problems of instant messengers
Despite the fact that the messengers market is considered to be one of the most profitable and successful in the world, it has many global problems that need to be resolved in the near future.
- A lack of data on the income of instant messengers. Most of the information is not publicly available. This fact raises many questions about the transparency of most messengers.
- Messengers are poorly monetized. Its advertising opportunities are poorly developed with rare exceptions (WeChat, Viber, Line, Kakao Talk).
- Small and medium-sized businesses get an access to the basic messenger capabilities for free, while the most popular messengers work only with a large business with multi-million income.
The UMC team is actively engaged in solving global problems of modern messengers. The introduction of blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence to the messengers market will help to bring it to a new qualitative level.
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.
Check our website for more information: https://umccoin.io/
