Five Friday Facts #82
News
News
KakaoTalk now has 100 million users
According to an article this week by TechInAsia, Korean chat app KakaoTalk has reached its most recent milestone: 100 million users. The chat app has continued to gain momentum since it first launched in 2010. As the graph below illustrates, their growth rate has become jaw-droppingly steep in recent months. KakaoTalk’s expansion goals for Southeast Asia have led to aggressive marketing tactics, such as TV commercials and celebrity endorsements in Indonesia. These strategies have clearly paid off, and are partly the impetus for the chat app’s recent success.
There are now 3 million company pages on LinkedIn
LinkedIn recently announced that they had recently hit a milestone on their platform: there are now over 3 million company pages on the network. The professional networking platform itself currently has over 225 million users. The company produced an infographic to celebrate this accomplishment on their blog post as well, with interesting factoids (such as the fact that there are over 1000 pages devoted to nanotechnology, and 490 pages with the word ‘ninja’, ‘pirate’ or ‘samurai in the company name). The infographic also suggests that a striking 500,000 of the 3 million company pages were added to LinkedIn in the last 12 months.
Vine shares drop as Instagram Video use rises
Mashable recently reported that Vine shares have dropped drastically as a result of Instagram’s new launch of a video feature. Based on a study by SimplyMeasured, the findings suggested that tweets containing Vine videos dropped by 40 percent on the day Instagram Video was introduced. Vine’s decline continued throughout Instagram Video’s first week; while 3 million Vines were tweeted on June 15, only 900,000 were shared on June 26. By contrast, Instagram video produced over 5 million videos on its first day (June 20). On the same day, TechCrunch noted that Instagram itself had accumulated 16 billion photos on the platform, with 130 million total users liking 1 billion photos on a daily basis.
WeChat has 70 million users overseas
A few weeks ago, we blogged about WeChat’s expansion outside of China. Unlike its Asian chat app counterparts, KakaoTalk and Line, WeChat’s user base had seen a large majority of its user base rooted firmly in China. The chat app saw some success in its drive to gain overseas users as they hit 40 million non China-based users during May. A more recent report by TechInAsia reveals that this number has climbed to a whopping 70 million users in six short weeks.
Zalo at 3M users, process 30M messages per day
In other chat app news, TechInAsia reports that Vietnam-based Zalo has reached 3 million users. Unlike WeChat, KakaoTalk and Line’s collective dominance over other markets across Asia, Vietnam remains “relatively untapped” in the region. Zalo, however, is succeeding in gaining users and currently processes over 30 million messages on a daily basis. As noted in a previous blog post, Zalo just hit 2 million in May, indicating that the app is gaining one million users every two months.