There’s no denying the growing scope and appeal of South Korea’s WhatsApp Messenger app, which hit 84 million users globally as of the end of March, 10 million of which are in Japan. The company recently became the number one application in Indonesia and now is looking to move away from mobile messaging and expand on its ways to earn money.
With that in mind, Kakao launched the its Kakao Page service, which features around 8,000 features, including texts, videos and applications that can be downloaded for a minimum 500 won ($0.44 USD) per piece”. Subscribers can also choose to upload their content on to the platform, but they will have to pay an annual fee of 50,000 won ($43.80 USD).
The new service will be available exclusively in the Korean language and on Android devices initially, but the company is looking at launching the platform on iOS in the future, as well as expanding the service to users around the world.
As Kakao expands outside of mobile messaging, it will be interesting to see if and when its competitors — including Naver Corp’s LINE and China’s WeChat — follow suit. Either way, it’s likely they’ll be dependent on their mobile messaging business for quite some time.