Why the messengers market will continue actively growing? Research of the advertising opportunities in instant messengers (part 1).

UMC
4 min readJul 5, 2018

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Hello, UMC Community!

It is difficult to imagine life without messengers for a modern person. The most popular messengers have already outgrown the largest social networks in the monthly audience.

The functionality of messengers has also significantly expanded: nowadays they are used for business, communication, advertising, news, partner search.

The potential of the messengers market is huge, this fact has been recognized by opinion leaders and corporations from all around the world. Mary Meeker, partner of the venture fund KPCB, appreciated the idea of messengers for their active development and rapid growth.

What is the geography of messengers?

The most popular instant messengers in the world are WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which have the leading positions in 104 countries. They are followed by Viber (Belarus, Ukraine, Serbia, Ethiopia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, Moldova, Montenegro, Macedonia and Tajikistan), Line (Thailand, Taiwan and Japan), WeChat (China), Telegram (Iran), KakaoTalk (Korea).

Telegram

Monthly active audience: 200 million users (official data), minimum 500 thousand users join the messenger every day.

During the creation of Telegram in 2013, the main idea of ​​the messenger was security (“Taking your privacy back”). With the growing popularity of Telegram, its philosophy also changed (“A new era of messaging”). The messenger consistently introduced stickers, supergroups, bots and channels. In 2018 Telegram successfully conducted the ICO and collected 1.7 billion dollars for the development of a global ecosystem based on the Telegram platform. In particular, Telegram will launch its own cryptocurrency, application store and advertising exchange.

Advertising opportunities of the messenger:

Telegram itself is positioned as an instant messenger without advertising. However, in countries where it is particularly popular (Iran, Russia, Ukraine), there are active exchanges of advertising for channels. Telegram plans to launch its own advertising exchange for channels, which functioning will take place on the basis of cryptocurrency launched in the near future. In addition, the service plans to make pay-walls for channels and bots.

WhatsApp

Monthly active audience: 1.5 million people

In 2014, WhatsApp became the most popular messenger in the world. Among the available messenger capabilities are business accounts (more than three million companies) and group chat rooms (more than a billion groups).

Advertising opportunities of the messenger:

In WhatsApp, the advertising function is unavailable. Spam mailings are also available in WhatsApp. In June 2018 the introduction mailings on the official level and banner advertising was announced. Thus, both co-founders left the company.

Viber

Monthly active audience: not published

Number of registered users: 980 million accounts

Since the foundation in 2010, the messenger has been actively developing and improving its functions: group chat rooms, calls and stickers (2012), Viber Out (2013), public chats (2016), group chats for a billion people (2018).

The advertising opportunities of the messenger include banner advertising in the application, advertising of channels, stickers, mailings (paid and subscribers of the channel).

In Viber, there are two types of newsletters: information and advertising. Information messages come to Viber users from banking services, delivery services, any other services, the main purpose of which is to notify the user. Promotional messages have the main purpose of motivating the user to purchase or use the service.

Stickers are distributed all over the world, the same set can be localized on all the languages ​​required by the brand. It is possible to create an animated set.

Conclusions

The growth rate of the audience of mobile messengers is ahead of the estimates of analysts: today they are already used by more than 2.5 billion people. The increase in the number of users, in turn, serves as an impetus to the development of their functionality and raises issues related to monetization of advertising platforms and payment for content in this market.

The messengers aggregated huge volumes of the audience — 1.2 billion users from Whatsapp, over 1 billion from Facebook Messenger, 858 million from Viber, 846 million from WeChat, 220 million from Line, 158 million from Snapchat, 100 million from Telegram, 48 million from KakaoTalk .

The introduction of innovative technologies such as blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data will help to solve a number of important strategic problems and move the advertising market in instant messengers to a new qualitative level!

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!

Register and check everything in your account: https://umccoin.io/

P.S. To continue reading further parts:

Why messengers market will continue actively growing? Part 2.

Why messengers market will continue actively growing? Part 3.

Geography of messengers market

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