Why Mail.ru Group launches another messenger

Mail.ru Group, in the assets of which the Agent and ICQ messengers are located, is launching a new product, TamTam , Kommersant reports . This is a messaging application that integrates a database of 290 million users registered with Odnoklassniki.



A new messenger was not created from scratch. Its authors creatively reworked the concept of a similar application, “OK Messages,” launched in July 2016. According to Vladimir Kochetkov, the author and project manager of TamTam, this made it possible to make a new product cheaply and quickly. The development of TamTam led four months.



“OK Messages” was created by the team of developers of the social network “Odnoklassniki” (part of the Mail.ru Group holding). In February 2017, the OK Messages mobile application was installed by about a million smartphone owners on the Android platform and more than 300,000 owners of Apple mobile devices. Now these users will be able to replace the instant messenger with TamTam, by installing a special update from Mail.ru.



“TamTam is already launched with a starting audience, there is an opportunity to find friends among millions of users, and this is its main advantage. Now, when the capabilities of many messengers are similar, the main for the user is not any one function, but the people with whom you communicate in the application, ”Vladimir Kochetkov believes.



The service will allow to correspond in personal messages and in group chats, share stickers with GIF-animation, send photos, video and audio recordings. Messenger allows you to communicate not only with friends, but also with subscribers. Mail.ru Group claims that the application should work stably even with a weak Internet connection. It is already available in the App Store and Google Play.



TamTam will be integrated with other company projects. As a successful example of such integration, the Kommersant source cites the Chinese WeChat messenger. His audience is approaching 1 billion people. WeChat is one of the most commercially successful platforms. With its help in China, users can, for example, make an appointment to see a doctor, pay bills and order goods.



By the way, WeChat has a worthy competitor - the Japanese Line messenger. Both messengers were launched in Asia, where they have a large market share. Certainly in Japan and Korea, in the home regions of the Line, the messenger managed to gain a firm foothold, including through powerful advertising and a huge amount of products with the Line Friends brand.



The future of TamTam will depend on whether it will find its own face that will distinguish it from other instant messengers. “Maybe it’s right to leave the OK brand and make a cross-platform project that can be promoted through VK, for example, through Mail.ru mail,” says Sberbank CIB senior analyst Svetlana Sukhanova.



Odnoklassniki and Viber audiences essentially overlap, and if TamTam is liked by Odnoklassniki users, Viber can lose about 10-15% of its audience, said Ilya Korolev, portfolio manager of the Internet Initiatives Development Fund.



The development of the third messenger Mail.Ru Group may be affected by new legislation. Yesterday, State Duma deputies submitted a bill to ban the anonymity of messenger users. The identification of network users should be carried out by the telecom operator using the subscriber number, which is in the identification contract concluded by the organizer of instant messaging with the telecom operator.



On May 24, the State Duma introduced a bill on the need to introduce fines for refusing to comply with the above provisions. For citizens, the amount of the fine is 3-5 thousand rubles, for officials - 30-50 thousand rubles, legal entities - from 800 thousand to 1 million rubles.