The number of emoji subscription purchases on the South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk has dropped by a third over the year, parent firm Kakao said in quarterly earnings call Thursday, blaming Google’s new in-app payment policy, which forces apps to use Android-maker’s own billing system.
KakaoTalk’s Emoticon Plus subscription service, which costs approximately $3.8 per month, allows users to access unlimited emojis. TechCrunch reported in June that South Korean app developers and content providers stand to see their paid subscription and service fees rise because of a recent change in Google’s Play marketplace that corners 15-30% commission fee.
Kakao chief executive Whon Namkoong said that the negative impact of Google’s new billing policy is “inevitable,” adding that the number of Kakao talk emoji purchases had dropped after Google introduced its new payment policy in June this year.
“From the users’ perspective, because of Google’s new in-app payment policy, the [digital goods] price hurdle has gone up,” Namkoong said. “As a result, if you look at [KakoTalk’s] Emoticon Plus [subscription] service, the number of new users has gone down to one-third of what we had seen over the year.”
Kakao plans to work on countermeasures to respond to the change, Namkoong said. “We are planning on running a promotion for users, using Google’s in-app payment, and also for our subscribers in order to make sure we minimize the impact from the in-app payment in the second half of the year,” he said.
The U.S. tech giant enforced changes to its in-app payment system in June this year to charge transactions overflowing from non-game apps and other types of digital goods including over-the-top (OTT), music streaming, web cartoons, digital book apps and more. The non-games apps, prior to the change, were permitted to direct consumers to outside payment sources through in-app links.
Google said earlier this year in blog post that “all developers selling digital goods and services in their apps are required to use Google Play’s billing system,” and clarified that apps using external payment links will be removed from Google Play Store starting in June to comply with Google’s new payment system.
Kakao runs two business: the platform business (Kakao Talk, Kakao Mobility, Kakao Pay) and the content business (Kakao games, Kakao Webtoons and Melon music streaming). The South Korean internet company posted its second-quarter revenue of $1.3 billion (1.82trillion WON), up 34.8% from the same period a year earlier, and a net income of $77.3 million (101.2 billion WON) for the quarter, down 68% from a year earlier.