BBM for Android beats out rival messaging services in user engagement minutes

Any way you look at it, BlackBerry's decision to rollout BBM for iOS and Android has been a success. After the first week, 20 million new active BBM users were added to the 60 million BlackBerry users who actively use the messaging app. In addition, data from Android users shows that in the first week after becoming available, BBM equaled or surpassed other messaging apps in the number of weekly engagements. Considering that BBM for Android users haven't had the time to build up a large contacts list, this is considered to be very impressive on the part of the BlackBerry application.

According to data from Mobidia, for the week ended October 24th, BBM for Android had a weekly engagement of 40 minutes, topping the 24 minutes scored by messaging app Tango (which has over 130 million users), and close to the 44 minutes of Viber. Kik still is on top with a weekly engagement of 106 minutes. Still, the data shows that Android users are doing more than merely downloading the app just to join the hip crowd.

While BBM is still well behind more popular messaging apps in the U.S. like Kik and WhatsApp, and may never enjoy the popularity among teens that other apps have, considering how BBM's journey has just started, we can say that it looks like this is going to be a rare success for BlackBerry. Now comes the hard part which is figuirng out how to make money with it. At one point months ago, there was talk of selling BBM access to users of rival platforms. Now that BlackBerry is giving it away, there needs to be a way for the application to generate some income for BlackBerry.

source: BGR