To the uninitiated, these large group chats might sound gimmicky - wouldn’t 100,000, or even 256, just be a cacophony? It seems, however, that if other chat networks are an indication, the most popular and successful of these mega group chats become useful feeds for people around special interests, and at best end up running along the lines of the “90-9-1” rule (respectively lurkers intermittent contributors heavy contributors). On Facebook, it is 150 LINE’s is 200 WhatsApp’s is 256 WeChat’s is 500 and Telegram touts 100,000. Viber Communities is the latest iteration in the trend of “super” group messaging - outsized chatrooms where members come to chat, or just listen into other’s chatter, on one topic or another. The monetizing and engagement features look like they might work similarly to those on Viber’s Public Chats and Public Accounts, where users have been able to follow personalities or brands and can interact in the stream in certain scenarios (for example, if the personality at the center of the chat is already a contact), and chat administrators can monetize the experience with ads and other features.Ĭommunities, it seems, can be around specific people, too, but are geared more toward specific topics and interests. However, Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten, pre-announced the details during his keynote at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday (with a video of it posted earlier today here). The company is expected to officially announce Viber Communities tomorrow. Members of the groups will be able to interact with comments and reactions, and group administrators will be able to monetize the streams, tapping into a network of app partners and the larger e-commerce and media business of Rakuten, which owns Viber (and is known as the Amazon of Japan).
In a bid to drive more usage and bring in more users to the app, Viber is launching a service called Viber Community, with group “limits” of up to 1 billion members - that is, limited only by the number of people registered on Viber itself, which, it says, now has passed the 1 billion mark. Now messaging app Viber is introducing the biggest group chat of them all. But they also have been adding large group chat options into the mix, to give a more social experience on those messaging platforms. Messaging apps have seen a surge of popularity in recent years as people seek ways to communicate more directly than on social networks.
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