A few weeks ago I read that the semi-popular KIK messaging app was going to shut down. IT was said that they put all thier hopes into doing some kind of new bitcoin like digital currency thing and that they were warned by the US securities commission that it might not be right to do so. Or something like that. Anyhow it seems that they were not able to roll out this kik-coin thing in time to rake in the millions from an “ICO” – and so they ran out of steam and were pulling the plug, with some of team staying behind to work on the new digital token thing, without the app able to keep it’s bills paid. At least that’s what I remember from a couple of articles / discussions – that may not be accurate or the best way to put it – it’s just what I read between the lines perhaps.
Well today I see another article saying that KIK was been bought and will be keeping the lights on – a media tech company in the USA is going to keep kik up and running, and keep more than a dozen people from the kik admin team to keep it updated and they are planning to monetize it with pushing ads very soon.
I’m glad they plan to keep it running, it was one of the more popular mobile apps for sexting for a long time. It may be the most popular mobile app that people jump to from adultsOnlySpace social network – there have long been groups there that share their kik nick/handle and take their adult chat to that app for messaging and mobile notifications.
It appears that the group that is taking over the kik thing had also purchased the ‘whisper’ app some time ago, so I think they should have enough knowledge in the ad and chat app space to keep this new purchase pulling in money from ads, and should hopefully still keep a keen eye on privacy balancing as well. Hopefully someone with better tools will report on this in the future.
There has been some chatter about the imgur picture hosting company no longer hosting the NSFW pics from the reddit portal’s threads – or making them disappear behind some clicks and logins and other things that will make it basically useless. Some discussions I read pointed to advertising companies not wanting to be around adult content, but I’m not sure that is the reason why.
What I think we need is someone, or some people who are willing to make some rules about adult products and services that can be run with mainstream content – so the naughty pics that places like tumblr used to have can not depend on mainstream brands to send advertising dollars – and then instead run ads for things like KY jelly, and playboy or something. It would only take a small team to write up some rules for non-hardcore landing pages and I think it would be possible to make money from both worlds and not have ads the pissed off people, or content that offended the ad buyers.
I know it’s a bit more complex than a few sentences to make things like that work, and who knows how long it could work before some zealots tried to make cases for this is bad for X because of Y and so one and try to de-platform both the mainstream and the porn. It seems to be the kind of world that is increasingly an issue that portals need to be wary about.
For today, here’s to KIK getting help to keep running, and glad that we are still here to help give people another place to share the sexier side of life. It’s not easy being too-sexy for fbook, but someone’s got to do it!