Payments major Paytm that had launched the in-app messaging service ‘Inbox’ last year has now integrated a slew of daily engagement services such as live television, news, cricket, entertainment videos, and games to users within the messaging premise.
As of now, Inbox has been offering in-app messaging service that allows you to chat with friends and family and send/request money at the same time. Following Paytm Inbox service, Google via its UPI-led platform ‘Tez’ had also integrated in-app chat feature for its 14.5 million active users.
Contrastingly, to increase user engagements on its platform, the Alibaba-backed Paytm has partnered with Hungama, UC News, and Yupp TV, among others, for content. With the latest addition, the company expects a surge in the number of sessions per users while increasing the time spent on the app.
This offering will be live on iOS by this weekend, and in Android by next week.
For the first time since Inbox’s launch in November, last year, the company has revealed the number of monthly active users.
Paytm with over 300 million registered users claims to have crossed 120 million monthly active users via its Inbox platform. Interestingly, India’s first UPI-enabled platform PhonePe and famous messaging platform Hike Messenger have only managed to garner 100 million registered users since their inceptions.
If the above figure still does not look like an exaggeration, then WhatsApp’s MAUs will surely help explain it in a better way.
The Facebook-owned instant messenger claims around 200 million monthly active users in India (However, this figure is expected to be around 250 million but no official claim has been made). So, at this speed, a nine-year-old firm’s monthly active users figure would be crossed by Paytm’s Inbox by the end of this year or easily by 2019.
It’s worth noting that the world’s most used messaging app took over three years to reach 120 million global monthly active users.
Running on the path of Chinese counterpart WeChat and to some extent, Facebook Messenger, Paytm Inbox’s sudden rise should be a curious case for other players in this space.
The development was first reported by ET.
