Social Messaging Apps To Have Over 2 Billion Users In 2014: Ovum Report

Social messaging is what has taken the world abuzz right now. The players are becoming increasingly competitive owing to large number of users active on these platforms. As per latest findings from Ovum, social messaging will reach “mass adoption” next year, surpassing 2 billion users from its current 1 billion plus mark. Dubbed as ‘Social Messaging 2014 Trends to Watch’, the report reveals that the number of messages being sent across these apps is set to grow from 27.5-trillion in 2013 to 71.5-trillion by the end of 2014.

The report further states that WhatsApp which is currently the leader in messaging apps will also dominate the global mobile Android and iOS messaging app market.  Affordable smartphones, access to mobile internet in emerging markets and large scale marketing campaigns will be the main reason for these large volume of messages. Ovum also highlights some social messaging trends like:  new wave of OTT players will hit the market in 2014, a fundamental shift in social networking services. Also social messaging will start to generate revenues and will evolve beyond text.

“Social media as an industry is undergoing a major transition, one of the key drivers of which is the rapid proliferation of social messaging services.  Social messaging apps are mobile centric services are intuitive and viral in growth have the ability to reach a wider audience. As new services get added on to messaging apps, we can expect these services to evolve into mobile media platforms which large user bases. In addition, we expect social messaging to slowly but surely start to generate revenues, which will assist in the evolution of social messaging players’ offerings from messaging apps to holistic mobile media platforms,” said Neha Dharia, Analyst, Consumer Telecoms and author of the report in a release.

The report further touts that in 2014 we will see social messaging player jump on revenue streams with stickers, games, videos and other services. Recently Viber, WeChat and Line opened their sticker stores for garnering revenue. Dharia adds, “There is an increasing shift to mobile devices on either side of the development process and there is no doubt that mobile-first services make fuller use of the advantages of mobile than services that are ported from the PC to mobile.”

Ovum concludes saying that the rise of these social messaging apps also means that traditional mobile carriers will face more pressure as one of their traditional revenue streams increasingly falls away.

Image Source | techcrunch

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