While WhatsApp might be the most popular Mobile Messenger app in most of the world, in Japan there's another name that's making waves in the local market. Called Line, it works in a very similar way to WhatsApp; and given its success in its native Japan, the company is now gunning for global growth.
Line's mission may have just had help in its goal thanks to this week's occurrences to WhatsApp itself. After selling to Facebook for a proposed $19 billion in combined cash, stock and incentives, WhatsApp's servers suffered a 210-minute outage that prevented people using the service, which many wrongly interpreted as Facebook either closing or doing behind-the-scenes work on the app following the purchase (more likely it was simply server overload). Following the deal and subsequent outage, Line saw its registered user account increase by over two million users over the next 24 hours, which Line claim is five times its usual user acquisition rate outside its home region of Asia, and specifically in North America, South America and Europe.
Following the news, the CEO of LINE Euro-Americas, Jeanie Han, issued a statement about the increased growth which makes a number of jabs at WhatsApp's outage:
“Our growth strategy has always included providing a strong network that can handle unplanned and unexpected increases in network traffic ... We pride ourselves on providing a safe, secure platform that will always work when our users need it the most.”
But Line isn't alone in benefitting from WhatsApp's woes. A third Mobile messaging app, Telegram, saw its user acquisition rate spike 3x after WhatsApp’s Facebook acquisition was announced – propelling it to the top of the App Store rankings and bringing it some 8 million new users in a handful of days. Many other similar apps also saw smaller growth levels, so it seems Mark Zuckerberg's big spending may once again bite both Facebook and their new acquisition in the ass - at least for now.
