Despite other big mobile messaging acquisition news this week, BlackBerry isn’t waiting long to unveil one tenet of its plan to make BBM a source of revenue for the company.
After releasing version BBM 2.0 for iOS and Android last week, which brought, among other things, BBM Voice and BBM Channels, the company is unveiling a new BBM Shop replete with sticker packs. Like LINE, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Viber and, well, practically every other popular messaging service except for WhatsApp, BlackBerry will begin selling stickers in packs of 20-25 for an unspecified price. Characters include CosCat, Gilbert’s Tales, Bubble Bot and more, and you can expect well-known brands from TV and movies.
BlackBerry is launching the BBM Shop, which is called thus because it will likely sell more than stickers in the coming months, in “external beta” today, and will roll out it publicly in the coming weeks.
While it may be easy to laugh off stickers as revenue generators, but LINE, Japan’s biggest mobile messaging platform, has added tens of millions of dollars to its income by introducing them; similarly, Facebook and Path have profited from their introduction. BlackBerry has a growing number of users, buoyed by the success of WhatsApp, Kik and others, and will likely turn this BBM Store into a successful venture.
It’s unclear whether the BBM Store will arrive on legacy BlackBerry devices, but it’s a shoe-in for BB10, Android and iOS. Look for more in the coming weeks.
[source]Inside BlackBerry[/source]
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