At the end of 2012 Naver Line, a free mobile messaging service, announced it reached 10 million downloads. Now, just two weeks later, the application’s App Store page claims 12 million downloads. The fledgling service is clearly experiencing rapid growth.
Hot on the heels of Naver’s big announcement comes its rival, KakaoTalk, with even more impressive news. KakaoTalk rang in the New Year announcing it achieved one billion messages sent in a single day.
In terms of growth, KakaoTalk was sending 600 million messages a day by the end of September last year. Three months later, on January 4, KakaoTalk achieved their milestone billion messages in a single day.
To put this amount of activity in perspective Kakao says one billion messages in a day equates to an average of 700,000 messages sent every minute. By comparison, in one minute:
- Twitter experiences 100,000 tweets
- Facebook get 510,000 comments posted
- Google receives 690,000 search queries
KakaoTalk is a South Korean startup that received investment from the A-Fund and has been quick to gain traction overseas. The recent billion message in a day announcement came from the Japanese arm of the company, which is experience particular success. In the future Kakao intends to add motion e-moji (smilies, etc.) and the ability to make voice calls for free.
[Image via KakaoTalk]