Dive Brief:
- Messaging app Kik has reason to celebrate as it recently hit 200 million monthly active users, but CEO Ted Livingston believes other metrics are a better indicator of the app's success.
- According to Livingston, monthly active users are easy to manipulate— through the use of push notifications for example—but comScore data shows that Kik has ridden the messaging app storm better than some competitors.
- The most impressive stat was engagement: Time spent within the app averaged at 35 minutes per visit.
Dive Insight:
Compared with Facebook, Snapchat, and WhatsApp— the bigwigs of mobile messaging—Kik is far less familiar to most people. The app appears to have zeroed in on America's young, mobile-first generation, and it seems to have worked—the app's most engaged users are teenagers. Kik's unexpected success goes to show that sometimes narrow targeting can produce the best results
While most CEO's would celebrate a 200 million monthly active user milestone, it's interesting that Livingston seems unimpressed. Kik appears to be the little engine that could in the mobile messaging world, making it the app to watch in 2015.
