Location-based Social App Momo Starts Monetization with Emoticons and Subscription

June 27, 2013 Leave a comment

Location-based Social App Momo Starts Monetization with Emoticons and Subscription

By Tracey Xiang on June 27, 2013

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Location-based social app Momo, launched 4.0 version with an emoticon market and subscription offerings, an obvious move for monetization.

The emoticon part must remind you of LINE, the Japan-based messaging app that made about $17 million from emoticons alone in Q1 2013, and the subscription model is a proven one in China, adopted by almost all kinds of Internet service for monetization, and still believed to be a good business model here.

The subscription package offers twelve privileges; for instance, subscribers can follow more users and have more people in a chatting group. It is sold for 12 yuan (about $1.9) per month or 30 yuan per quarter. It’d be cheaper if you subscribe to it for a year.The package also includes free emoticons or discounted ones. Of course you can buy them directly if you want more. A virtual currency, Momo Coin, is introduced for the convenience of purchases. The most expensive emoticons are for about 12 yuan each, or 10.8 yuan for subscribers — it sounds very expensive to me. However, I’d soon be reminded that Chinese users would spend several hundred yuan on a QQ Show, a virtual costume or item created for Tencent’s QQ IM. And LINE also has justified the model.

Momo, launched in August 2011, announced 30 million users in March this year. It raised $2.5 million funding from Matrix Partners in 2011 and $40 million Series B funding from Alibaba Group, DST and Matrix Partners in August 2012.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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