BBM Channel Subscriptions Doubled After Cross-Platform Release

For those unfamiliar with BBM Channels, you could almost think of them as being somewhat similar to Facebook Pages, where individuals or companies can setup Channels that BBM users can subscribe to. Given BBM’s userbase, that’s a lot of potential users that companies could get access to and keep up to date via Channel Updates and more.

So with the release of BBM for iOS and Android, has this impacted Channels? Well it turns out that it did. In fact it seems that Channel subscribers for certain brands have actually doubled since the release of the cross-platform version of BBM.

This is according to BBM’s senior director of business development, David Proulx, who shared some of his insights with the folks at CrackBerry. According to Proulx, “We actually have seen, case in point, Olympics or Coke. When we launched BBM channels on iOS and Android we saw doubling of subscriber bases for a lot of the sort of channels that I think are broadly interesting, or from broad development.”

In fact this doubling of subscribers is actually a good sign for BlackBerry because one of the ways the company plans on monetizing the service is to introduce ads. Recently BlackBerry has explained that the way ads work for BBM will be non-intrusive, meaning that you won’t see it pop up in your private messages, or appear as a banner in the middle of the screen.

Instead BlackBerry will rely on companies paying them to promote their Channels, such as placing featured Channels at the top, as well as paying to promote their updates, all of which can be found in their respective sections of the app.

The doubling of subscriber is also a sign that BBM users are more than happy to subscribe to Channels of the brands that they like, but we have to wonder how all of this might change in the future once the ads are put into place. What do you guys think? Will BlackBerry’s monetization of BBM be successful?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Apps, BBM, BlackBerry