The mobile has become one of our basic needs just as food, shelter and clothing and instant messaging is the soul of our new basic necessity. Today there is no household where you won’t find this.
It is these IM Apps that wish us good morning each day and also put us to sleep every night. They have become an inseparable part of our lives. I have a lot of information to prove this to all those living in denial. Read on!
To start there’s Brazil where 90% of the people are hooked to IM Apps. If you are wondering how many people these are let me tell you that it’s as many as 180 million people. The same number of people are so impressed with Instagram worldwide that they have turned into active monthly users. Does this sound harmless to you? I have more shock to add to the news. Did you know that Coca-Cola gives out 1.6 billion servings each day? If you are looking for the relevance of Coca Cola servings here let me clarify that I’m trying to tell you that only 12 days of Coca Cola servings will bring you to the same amount that was given out by Facebook to buy WhatsApp. The total amount comes up to 19 billion dollars!
Moving on, UK saw a drop in SMS text messages by 7 billion last year, as a result of rise in instant messages by 160 billion. Research in this study has revealed that the average age of early users of instant messages was 25 years, the age at which author J.K Rowling gave the world the Harry Potter fantasy. Scholars have also been able to do some predictions regarding the fate of IM Apps for Android, Windows and iOS in 2014. They predict that 50 billion instant messages will be sent in the days to come this year. The same number of connected devices are expected to be seen in the world by the year 2020.
If you are extremely shocked by the above mentioned numbers I have some more head turning statistics to present to you. We Chat which originated in China has 600 million registered users placed mostly in China and Asia. WhatsApp has 590 million registered users spread over USA, Germany, Mexico, India, Spain, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia. Its popularity is spread far and wide from USA which is its place of birth. Facebook messenger also shares its place of birth with WhatsApp and has 500 million users. Majority of its registered users are located in USA alone. Similarly Line was born in Japan with 300 million users and most of them are found in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan. Viber belongs to Israel and has 200 million users who are predominantly located in Israel, India and Cyprus. Snapchat on the other hand has originated in USA and its 100 million users are spread over USA, UK and Norway. Lastly Kakao Talk from South Korea has 100 million users but it has not been able to go beyond its birth place.
Let us now take a look at the possible future of the instant messaging apps over the next 5 years. It has been predicted that IM Apps will rule the world by generating 2% of the mobile messaging market revenue by 2018. They will also contribute to 75% of the mobile messaging traffic by this time. Instant messages are likely to process 63 trillion messages by 2018. How much of Instant messaging are you involved in?
