Messenger as a Platform: It’s a War, Not a Battle
Disclosure: I used to work for KakaoTalk as a Community Manager in Indonesia.
Few days ago, Minh from Tech in Asia posted an article that said chat apps are not fighting a battle, and that they can co-exist. I’d say yes, they can co-exist, but do they want to? Nope, I don’t think so, especially when you have a platform strategy and want to be a platform to do a lot of things on top of your messenger’s userbase.
For example, Kakao is being used by more than 90% of smartphone users in South Korea. If someone wants to buy a phone, they will ask for KakaoTalk and the sight of people using KakaoTalk are everywhere in the subway. This has been leveraged by Kakao to build things on top of it, with games as a natural expansion. Kakao has recorded $311 million in revenue just the first half of this year on its games, why? How? Platform play
If Kakao controls South Korea, at the other side, Line controls Japan (47 million users). And Thailand (18 million), plus Taiwan (17 million) too! This domination in several important markets makes it easy for Line to do its platform play. It has recorded $132 million of revenue just in Q2 2013, and yes, half of it coming from its games. Line continues its effort to dominate markets like Spain, India, and Indonesia
But of course, if we are talking about messenger with one of the most active users, we can’t leave out WeChat. With its domination in China, it has able to do things such as: games, shopping/loyalty, banking, m-commerce, and even vending machines!
In Indonesia, the war is very real for these messaging apps or, shall we say, platforms. If you watch local TV in prime time slots, you will see TVC from these messenger. After Kakao announced that Indonesia is its biggest userbase after Korea (surpassing Japan), Line came out with an even bigger news that it has 14 million active users in Indonesia, making the uber social country its top-five biggest users. Meanwhile, according to On Device research WhatsApp is winning the war with more than 16 million active users (estimate from the market share percentage compared to Line’s active users).
To summarize, most messenger, if not all is trying to become a platform (starting with Kakao, then Line, and WeChat). But in order for you to become one in a country, you have to win the war and dominate. For example, if Kakao wasn’t dominating Korea, Line in Japan, and WeChat in China, it’ll be hard to become a platform in their respective countries and experimenting with revenue models.I would say the war has just getting hotter and again, to be a platform, you have to dominate, not co-exist.
On a side note, LINE has just published its M-Commerce, LINE Shopping. (article in Bahasa Indonesia)