High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article.
The messaging service Viber has been bought for $900m by Japan’s largest e-commerce company by sales, Rakuten. So what is its secret?
1. It was once billed as a ‘Skype killer’, thanks to its simple mobile interface and the fact that users don’t need to log in to receive messages. About 100m people use Viber each month, compared to the 430m who use rival WhatsApp.
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article.
Its 280m registered users are still well short of Skype, which has more than 1bn, but Viber is strong in markets such as Vietnam and the Philippines where it has over 16m registered users.
2. Its founder was a key technologist in the Israeli army. Talmon Marco rose to chief information officer of the central command in the 1990s, before starting a file-sharing service, iMesh. When that was consumed by lawsuits, he started Viber in 2010.
Viber’s main offices are in Cyprus and Belarus, home of cheap developers, and Mr Marco has played down its links to his homeland. “We maintain a research and development centre in Israel and that’s it.”
3. It never took institutional financing. Israel is famed for its high rates of venture capital investment, but Viber’s funding was “friends and family”, Mr Marco has said.
That sets the service apart from other start-ups born in Israel, such as the mapping service Waze, which was bought by Google for about $1bn.
4. Revenues were just $1.5m last year – but there will be no advertising. “We do not believe in plastering our users with advertisements,” Mr Marco said in an interview in November. “It is not something we will do.” The strategy sets Viber apart from Skype, which under Microsoft has shown users display adverts during audio calls.
Instead revenue-generating ideas include: selling downloadable stickers (a market also targeted by rival service Line), charging for calls to non-Viber numbers (with cheaper rates than Skype, it claims), and carrying part of international phone calls (currently being piloted). Sales were zero in 2012 and $1.5m in 2013, while net losses were $14.7m and $29.5m respectively.
5. It’s not just on mobile. There are dozens of popular mobile messaging services, but in May 2013, Viber went further – launching a desktop app for OS X and Windows operating systems.
6. Its privacy policy is controversial. The app saves a copy of each user’s address book on Viber’s servers, unlike other services which just scan users’ contacts. So once someone signs up for Viber, their friends are added to the database even though they may have never downloaded the app.
No comments:
Post a Comment