Chinese 'one-night stand' app Momo boasts 80 million users
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 13 November, 2013, 3:58pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 13 November, 2013, 6:28pm
Olivia Rosenman [email protected]
A mobile screen showing the page of Momo, a very popular mobile location-based social network Photo: Simon Song
Momo, a popular instant messaging app in China, now has 80 million users, according to the CEO Tang Yan, who made the announcement on the company's Weibo blog on Wednesday.
Some 13 million people use Momo every day, generating a daily average of 500 million messages, according to Tang. The application was launched in August 2011.
Demonstrating the power of operating in the Chinese market, Momo boasts twice as many users as Foursquare, a similar application popular outside China. Foursquare was launched two years before Momo and is available in 12 languages.
Momo is a location based instant messaging application for smartphones. Users can connect to people nearby and share free texts, audio notes and photographs over the internet. Momo seeks to “change the future of mobile interactions”, Tang wrote on his blogpost on Tuesday.
The app gained 10 million users in its first year and this year has been particularly successful, adding an extra 50 million users since March.
Although it offers a slightly different service, Momo is still far from matching the 271.9 million monthly active users reported by WeChat, a Chinese messaging app that has managed to penetrate the international market.
However, as it has gained a salacious reputation, it is commonly referred to as “a magical tool to get laid” (约炮神器), Momo could find itself restricted to China’s population of singles looking for a date.
Momo was founded in March 2011 by four Beijingers who had previously worked at two of China’s biggest internet portals, Sina and Netease. Tang did not make public any information about revenue and profit on Tuesday, but simply said, “We are not in debt”.
