For the first time, more than 55 million people open KakaoTalk in a given month. Figures Kakao released on the 10th put the app's monthly active users at 55.346 million in the second quarter. It first crossed the 50-million line back in the first quarter of 2018, which means stacking the next five million on top took nearly eight years.

What draws the eye isn't the milestone itself but where the extra users came from. Domestic numbers kept climbing, yet this quarter carried a new factor from beyond the border: overseas, in Russia especially, KakaoTalk got tapped as a stand-in for Telegram.

The trigger dates to February. When Russian authorities clamped down on how Telegram operates, downloads of KakaoTalk jumped almost at once. According to the Russian outlet Afisha Daily, on March 23 the app sat at No. 7 among free apps on Russia's Apple App Store and second in the social networking category. A day later, on the 24th, it climbed to fourth in communication on the Google Play Store and 16th among all free apps.

Why KakaoTalk, of all things? One industry figure explained that "in Russia, the state holds control, so people use Telegram a lot (as a mobile messenger)," adding that "once Telegram was restricted, they installed KakaoTalk (a Korean service) in large numbers." People sidestepped the service under the state's eye and moved to an unfamiliar option that sat outside it.

To make sense of this, you have to know how the messaging market works. People adopt whatever app their friends already use. The earlier a service takes hold, the harder it is to leave — a dynamic usually called the network effect. That's why a slick new messenger rarely finds a way in, and why the door opens only when some event shakes an incumbent. The pressure Russia put on Telegram was exactly that kind of opening.

Kakao is also chipping away at the language barrier. Starting with Korean and adding English, Japanese and Chinese, then Vietnamese, Indonesian, Arabic, Hindi and Russian, the KakaoTalk chat box now handles translation across 19 languages in all. The idea is that users speaking different tongues can talk without switching to another app.

The company is sketching an overseas push through business-to-business (B2B) work too. In North America it plans to layer business solutions onto ventures it already runs, such as branded emoticons and message and display ads. In Japan it aims to formally launch an advertising product built on KakaoTalk before year's end.

There's a reason for looking outward. At home KakaoTalk already reaches so much of the country that analysts have long judged its room to grow as narrow. In particular, as teenagers and people in their twenties drift toward global social networks like Instagram, the paths to fresh users look scarce.

Even so, the domestic base kept swelling. In the first quarter of 2018, when overall MAU first passed 50 million, domestic users numbered 43.526 million. By the second quarter of this year that figure reached 49.631 million, up about 14.0 percent. Overall MAU at home and abroad likewise rose from 50.348 million to 55.346 million, a gain of roughly 9.9 percent. Since domestic growth outpaced the total, the weight of that growth still rests at home for now.

The trouble is what comes after. WhatsApp and Telegram planted their flags in the global messaging market first, and the network effect described earlier props them up firmly. That's the backdrop for experts who doubt KakaoTalk can win a head-on fight. Still, some argue the road isn't fully blocked. A detour remains, one that uses Korean content intellectual property (IP) and artificial intelligence (AI) as leverage.

Jeon Seong-min, a business administration professor at Gachon University, said that "the messaging market is heavily shaped by network effects, but it isn't as if there's no chance for multihoming," adding that "if KakaoTalk keeps experimenting as an AI agent built on things like Korean content IP, it can be plenty competitive." Multihoming refers to the habit of one person keeping several messengers side by side. You can install KakaoTalk without deleting Telegram — that gap is precisely what users in Russia demonstrated.

The number 55 million confirms the ground KakaoTalk has held for years. Whether it can take one more step beyond that ground, though, will most likely be decided not in the familiar home market but out past the border.

This article was rewritten from reporting by 전자신문 IT. Source: 전자신문 IT