Momo: With 40 Million Users, China’s Top Flirting App Adds Stickers, Virtual Currency, and VIPs

June 28, 2013 Leave a comment

Momo: With 40 Million Users, China’s Top Flirting App Adds Stickers, Virtual Currency, and VIPs

June 28, 2013

by Steven Millward

Momo-App-Adds-Stickers-Virtual-Currency-and-VIPs

Momo, China’s top flirting and hook-up app, has updated to v4.0 on both iPhone and Android and added a bunch of new features – all of which are aimed at monetization.

Ever since we first looked at Momo in late 2011 the app has been fairly minimal (in a good way), but the new raft of features adds a lot more to the dating app. The biggest departure for the app – which has just surpassed 40 million users – is an optional VIP membership that costs $2 for one month, or a cheaper annual package is $17. As a VIP Momo user, you get useful things like telephone support, the ability to follow more than 100 people, extra avatar options, and lots more.To monetize its non-VIP members there’s now a store within the Momo app that sells virtual stickers. Clearly that’s inspired by social messaging apps like Japan-made Line or China’s WeChat. Those sticker packs can be bought with a virtual currency called Momo coins. 100 of those shiny coins cost $2, and that’s also the price (rather steep) of many of the emoticon packs.

Momo got $40 million in funding last summer, and we believe that Alibaba, China’s top e-commerce company, was involved, though that wasn’t confirmed officially. Whoever the major investors, it appears that Momo is now ready to make some money from its social network. Hopefully all those new users – still flocking in at the rate of about 10 million new ones every four months – won’t be scared off by the VIP package or the pricey extra emoticons.

The international version of Momo, which first launched last October, remains at v2.0 and doesn’t get any of these changes. Since non-Chinese web users have a much lower tolerance of clutter and feature bloat, it’s probably a good idea not to throw all those new things at its global flirters.

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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