Myriad Group AG (SIX Swiss Exchange: MYRN) reports that its social messaging service, msngr, has evolved into Versy. This is said to demonstrate the company’s move towards a more content-driven social experience and away from a pure group chat proposition.
Drawing on Myriad’s mobile expertise and growing relationships with major content providers, including Warner Music, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Perform Group, Versy offers Latin American mobile users a fun and easy way to build communities around engaging content.
Stephen Dunford, Myriad’s CEO comments, “The new brand Versy better reflects our vision and is the first step in an ambitious journey ahead. The mobile messaging space is crowded, particularly for a public company. So far we’ve been unique in offering our service to both smartphone and feature phone users, a market still underserved in Latin America and which afforded us aggressive early growth. However, to succeed in the long term we needed a very clear and different proposition, one that would ultimately deliver value to all of our stakeholders – our users, partners and our shareholders.”
“To guide our focus, we’ve carried out significant in-market research to better understand how to enrich the social and community lives of our user base in Latin America. These insights, along with the engagement we are seeing with our still nascent content channel experience, leads to a new direction that takes us beyond messaging and towards inspiring conversations with content. Our work is still underway, and we’ve now established a sizeable enough user base to sustain us in this transition. We expect user growth to plateau as we improve the existing user experience and seed the monetisation models we are building with our partners and plan to pilot later this year,” adds Stephen Dunford.
Versy will continue to expand its content offering via strategic relationships with content and brand partners, as well as a growing portfolio of independent content producers (bloggers, influencers and trendsetters), whilst introducing new tools and features. As the user experience evolves, Versy will offer a unique combination of content discovery and social discussion, giving brands and content partners alike the opportunity to expand and grow their audiences within one of the most active mobile and social media markets in the world.
According to a study by the New York Times1 which investigated the reasons why people share content, 73% said they share content because “it helps them connect with others who share their interests”, and 78% said they share information online because “it lets them stay connected with people they may not otherwise be in touch with”. As Versy develops, Myriad will bring together the best of both worlds, a world of conversation inspired by content
