After unveiling a series of new features that drastically expand its reach, today Line revealed a series of statistics regarding activity on its signature messaging app, including the number of people that use it every month.
That number? 170 million monthly active users, out of a current count of 560 million registered users.
This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. After Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten purchased Cyprus-based messenger Viber, the company revealed that it had 100 million monthly active users among a total user base of 280 million. Tango, after receiving US$215 million in funding from Alibaba, reported 70 million monthly active users among a total user base of 200 million.
Why the fixation on MAUs? It’s certainly not the only metric for measuring an app’s traction. But given how messaging apps are relatively demographic-proof, and given how the MAU is an industry standard for software of this kind, it’s preferable to a count of registrations.
In any case, there’s a connection between the two metrics. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum might be right when he calls registered users a bullshit statistic. But if you’re dead set on finding out MAUs, it looks like the name of the game is “take the bullshit statistic and divide by three.”
Mobile messaging will likely end up a market-by-market game, with a number of players co-existing in a single country. But from a global perspective, it looks like Facebook has won this game, even as a latecomer. As of August, Facebook-owned WhatsApp claimed to have over 600 million monthly active users. In April, Facebook reported 200 million monthly active users for Facebook Messenger, and that was before the company forced users to download its standalone chat app.
See: 5 reasons why the battle between WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and Line matters
Line also released an updated count of its registered users region by region:
- Japan: 54 million registered users
- Thailand: 33 million
- Indonesia: 30 million
- Spain: 18 million
- Taiwan: 17 million
Despite its global reach and outsized ambitions, don’t expect the payments and food delivery side of Line to come to your town just yet. Setting up an infrastructure that supports small businesses takes considerable time. Judging by the rollout of Line’s peer-to-peer marketplace app, users in Taiwan and Thailand will likely be the next group of people to outside of Japan to get the new services.
Line raked in US$177 million in revenues during the quarter ending in June 2014, the large majority of which came from game-related purchases. The company originally intended to IPO this autumn, but has since postponed with an eye towards next year.
Line finally reveals its monthly active user count
