By
Sibusiso Tshabalala (Quartz Africa) October 24, 2015
On Friday (Oct. 23), Mxit,
the South African-born instant messaging service, once dubbed Africa’s largest
social network (SEE STORY EMBEDDED), announced that it was giving up the battle to compete against
other mobile messaging platforms.
The company is “shutting
down its commercial operations” reports Fin24, opting to hand over its IP and
technology to the Reach Trust—a South African organization that uses mobile
technology to solve educational and health challenges.
Founded in South Africa in
2005, Mxit was a popular instant messaging service for millions of South
Africans, before the advent of Facebook, Whatsapp and other social networks in
the country. In 2012, CNN reported that Mxit had 10 million users in South
Africa, outpacing Facebook and Twitter at the time, with 6 million and 1.1
million users respectively.
But by 2013, Mxit’s hold on
South Africa’s instant messaging market began sliding as Whatsapp began growing
its popularity. According to Fin24, the company had 7.5 million active users in
2013, this declined to 1.2 million active users in July 2015.
Mxit’s instant messaging
service was initially built for “feature phones”—handsets that are enabled with
basic web and multimedia functionality, but lack the advanced features of a
smartphone—allowing millions of South Africans to access instant messaging
through the mobile web. Michael Jordaan, a South African venture capitalist and
chair of Mxit, told Fin24 that the company’s declining user numbers were linked
to smartphones becoming readily available, and that Mxit users switched over to
Whatsapp as they upgraded to smartphones.
Speaking to Quartz, Arthur
Goldstuck, a South African tech analyst, said that there was a lot that South
African start-ups could learn from Mxit’s demise.
“The first thing [Mxit] did
wrong is that they became complacent when they were at their peak. They made
the same mistake Netscape made in the 90s— it underestimated Microsoft, and two
years Netscape was wiped out. It was not only the rise of smartphones that led
to Mxit’s decline, it was also the rise of other social networks. They woke up
too late,” said Goldstuck.
Mxit By Numbers In Its Heydays
 |
In
2012, CNN reported that Mxit had 10 million users in South Africa, outpacing
Facebook and Twitter at the time, with 6 million and 1.1 million users
respectively.
|
 |
In
2012, CNN reported that Mxit had 10 million users in South Africa, outpacing
Facebook and Twitter at the time, with 6 million and 1.1 million users
respectively.
|
BACK IN 2010: Why Mxit Is Africa’s
Largest Social Network
While
South Africa’s teachers were on strike in September, volunteers used the
country’s largest social network to help students prepare for exams. If you
think they turned to Facebook, you would be wrong.
They
turned to the country’s mobile instant messaging and social network service, MXit.
MXit
is primarily a Java-based mobile application giving users the functionality to
exchange instant messages practically for free. Users are able to message in
groups, called chat zones, functioning seamlessly across other platforms like
MSN messenger and Google Talk.
In
the early stages of the application’s development, it was a cheaper replacement
for SMS among the youth. Now the service has evolved into a broader social
network play.
“I
think users just immediately saw a cost benefit to using MXit,” said the
company’s spokesperson Juan du Toit.
“People
saw that this is an easy application to get on a low-end phone… it made sense
for them to use MXit compared to something more complex like Facebook or
Twitter.”
For
South Africans like 19-year-old Michillay Brown, the service almost renders
ordinary text messaging obsolete.
“That’s
why there are so many people on MXit, I think it’s like one cent a message or
something,” Brown said. “They obviously want to chat with their friends for
free, quickly.”
MXit
is the brainchild of Namibian-born software developer Herman Heunis. The
company is co-owned by Naspers, a US$15-billion South African-based media
company focused on internet investments in emerging markets. Naspers also owns
a stake in one of the world’s largest social networks, the Chinese TenCent, and
now indirectly has a stake in Facebook via a Russian-based Digital Sky
Technologies (DST) investment.
Since
MXit’s inception in 2003, the service claims it has expanded to include almost
27 million subscribers, most of them South African, and is adding 40,000 more
every day.
In
comparison, less than three million South Africans use Facebook, which is why
during the teachers’ strike, tutors chose MXit as a platform to answer
questions from students and to provide study materials for download.
The
system sidesteps a major obstacle hampering the spread of social media in
developing countries: Internet access. In much of Africa, weak infrastructure
limits access to electricity, phone lines and the Internet, making surfing the
Web often an expensive luxury.
But
cellphone technology has already entrenched itself across the continent, with
376 million subscribers across the region. A recent ITU report says that about
162 million of the predicted 226 million new Internet users in 2010 will be
from emerging markets, where Internet usage is growing at a higher rate than
anywhere else in the world.
Wallace
Chigona, a technology professor at the University of Cape Town, believes
cellular is an ideal platform for social media in Africa.
“For
the majority of middle-income families, a cellphone is the only computer they
have, and the low cost allows families to acquire them for their children,”
Chigona said.
“Even
cell phones that would technically struggle to support Internet connectivity
would support MXit.”
The
company hopes the same logic will apply in other developing countries, and
hoping to grow in places like Indonesia, where it claims almost 2.5 million
users.
Not
everyone with a cell phone can use MXit. The application is powered by data
services like 3G or GPRS, which require mobile Internet access to work.
MXit
has its detractors, many of whom are concerned parents. They worry that teens
are vulnerable online, recalling concerns that erupted over early versions of
Facebook and Myspace elsewhere in the world.
“There
is fear of the unknown, and as parents we lack understanding of what is going
on on MXit and our natural reaction is to stop it,” Chigona said. “The media is
partly to blame… most of the reports published about MXit were all these horror
stories.”
One
such horror story occurred in July when a South African man drugged and raped a
15-year-old girl he met in a chat zone. In response, the company installed additional
safety features enabling parents to better monitor their child’s activity on
MXit.
But
Chigona believes demand for innovations like MXit could hasten the spread of
mobile broadband in emerging markets.
“The
product became part of the youth identity,” he said. “There was huge peer
pressure for the youth to get on board, and in fact, a good number of them
acquired cell phones so that they can have MXit.”
*With additional reporting
via AFP
Original stories from: Story 1: Quartz Africa; Story 2: Memeburn
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