As we celebrate BBM’s 10th birthday this month, I’d like to thank everyone who has been involved with our pioneering mobile messaging service. Check out Jesse Ariss’ blog post, where he interviews BlackBerry Principal Architect and main creator of BBM, Gary Klassen. Some great insights and history that BBM users will likely enjoy.
BBM continues to be a pioneer, as the announcement of our exciting new mobile payments service with PayPal shows. Once you connect your PayPal account to BBM, you can start sending and receiving money during BBM chats. It’s that simple. The service is in beta for Canadian users today, but we’re expanding to other regions around the globe in coming weeks.
BBM is continuing to grow in all aspects: from new user registrations, to our monetization streams, with ads, content, subscriptions and payments.
BBM User Growth
Indeed, July was one of our strongest months on record for BBM growth. This was driven by the release of BBM 2.9 with its Material Design enhancements for Android users, summer holidays, and strong word-of-mouth.
BBM Shop
Stickers aren’t just kid’s stuff anymore. More than 30 million stickers are sent every day over BBM, and more than 450 free and paid sticker packs reside in the BBM Shop these days.
We have also launched several very successful brand-sponsored sticker campaigns, with the most recent by Rakuten generating over 35 million impressions in Indonesia alone over two weeks, and driving over 750,000 clicks to our partner’s website using our unique promotional sticker product — stickers with embedded and customizable links. We also held a sticker contest in Indonesia and received thousands of submissions from talented artists.
Do you have a specific request of something you’d like to see in a sticker pack? Do you have some sticker ideas you’d like to develop? Feel free to contact us at stickers@blackberry.com.
BBM Advertising
We continue to record new milestones on our ad business. July was no different as we saw a strong growth trajectory through the month, despite the lull created by the summer holidays. Marquee advertisers included the New York Times, TD Bank, Mint, Samsung, Smartfren (devices), Traveloca (travel), RedMart (retail) and Manulife (insurance).
We also recently began offering video ads in BBM. The first set of video advertisers include the likes of King.com, OLX and Studio M Hotel. Video ads provide a great opportunity to drive higher revenues, while also exposing BBM users to newer exciting content on our platform.
BBM Payments in Indonesia
BBM users in this country of 250 million will soon have 3 ways to pay securely. Besides the coming PayPal integration, there is instant mobile payments via BBM Money and the option to send prepaid mobile credit to sellers or friends and family. We see a great demand for mobile payments among our users. In Indonesia, bank transfers remain the predominant way to pay online by far. No wonder that during a recent e-commerce campaign we ran in the country, the merchants involved told us that BBM Money outperformed bank transfers and all other methods of payment except credit card, in terms of helping convert prospective customers to actual sales.
