MediaLab Acquires Kik Chat App

News in Brief:

• Kik Messenger continues to live with its acquisition by MediaLabs.
• MediaLabs plans to improve the chat app overall by fixing the app’s speed and bugs.

If you thought that Kik messenger was about to breathe its last, then that is not going to happen, not anytime soon anyway. MediaLab, a Los Angeles-based multimedia company recently acquired Kik messaging app.

Actually, this acquisition is not so much a surprise as the CEO of Kik Interactive, Ted Livingston remarked in a tweet earlier this month that a “great company” is willing to buy the Kik app, in order for it to “continue growing it for our millions of users.”

In the company’s blog post on Friday, it was stated that “Kik is here to say” and that MediaLab has now “finalized the agreement with Kik Interactive”.

MediaLab also has another anonymous social network app called Whisper. And with this new acquisition, the company’s portfolio is expanding for good. Nevertheless, Whisper has never witnessed an audience size which Kik Messenger enjoys, but it has managed to stay afloat all these years.

Moreover, before moving on to fixing intricate problems with the app, the company is has decided to first go “back to the basics”. After this, the company plans to handle bugs and long-requested features such as increased group sizes and an option to delete group admins that are inactive, among others.

At the top of the list of priorities, the company has placed tasks such as troubleshooting bugs, blocking spam bots, increasing the app’s speed, etc. and will solely focus on these, at least for a few coming months. In fact, some features such as third-party bots, and video chat toggle are retreating to the drawing board. Moreover, MediaLab has also decided to incorporate in-app ads in order to cover the costs.

The company boldly stated that “We believe that Kik’s best days remain ahead of it,”. 

In an announcement, prior to the acquisition, Livingston said that the company will shrink down to the team size of 19 people, which will adversely affect the livelihood of more than 100 families. However, we are not updated on this topic, whether this plan is still on or not, now that the Kik app has now been acquired.

In September, Livingston also said the company intends to redirect its resources towards Kin, the company’s cryptocurrency. The company has been fighting a lengthy legal battle with the Security Exchange Commission, which Livingston said to be “a long and expensive process to drain our resources.” All this goes back to 2017 when SEC sued Kik Interactive when the company raised $100 million via an initial coin offering and SEC declared it al illegal.

And now when Kik is a part of MediaLab company, Kik Interactive can solely focus on its Blockchain side of their business and users of Kik app can go back to happily enjoying the application. 

THE AUTHOR

Shivani Dubey

Content Writer