NAVER’s Community Platform BAND Exceeds 150 Million Downloads as It Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary
NAVER’s Community Platform BAND Exceeds 150 Million Downloads as It Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary
NAVER’s Community Platform BAND Exceeds 150 Million Downloads as It Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary
- BAND reaffirms its position as a leading platform for meetups with 156 million accumulative downloads, 53 million bands and 6.1 billion posts
- During its first decade, BAND’s usability evolved with mission challenges and neighborhood community features to serve users’ changing needs in line with the latest trends
- Four out of 10 users are in their teens and twenties as the ‘Living a productive life’ trend helped boost usage of mission challenges among millennials and Generation Z
2022-08-08
NAVER’s community platform BAND today celebrates its 10th anniversary.
First launched on Aug. 8, 2012, BAND has been the leading online meetup platform among Koreans over the past decade. Recently, the app has accumulated 156 million downloads with 53 million bands and 6.1 billion posts. There are more than 50 billion chat messages and 20 billion comments so far.
BAND has constantly enhanced its service and evolved its community platform usability to meet users’ advancing needs. Starting as a meetup platform for acquaintances, it expanded into a platform where people meet based on common interests in 2015. In 2019, BAND further segmented online meetups by first launching ‘Mission BAND’ where people can gather to achieve common goals. Then, at the end of 2021, it launched ‘Neighborhood BAND’ where users can share interests based on geographical location. During the pandemic, as demand for non-contact meetups increased, BAND enhanced its virtual meeting service with the launch of the video call feature, and added remote schooling features, including quizzes and surveys on the platform.
As a result, BAND has seen a constant inflow of users in their teens and 20s who are sensitive to trends. Currently, these young users account for 26% of all users as the ‘Living a productive life’ trend has helped boost usage and led Gen Z and millennial users to join various Mission BANDs. More than 30% of Mission BAND users are in their teens or 20s and messages showing mission accomplishment account for 31% of 20 million posts by these age groups.
NAVER upgraded BAND services this month with the aim of diversifying communities through Mission BAND and Neighborhood BAND on the platform. The company added Mission and Neighborhood tabs on the BAND home screen to make it easier for users to navigate.
In addition, NAVER is hosting a marketing campaign to celebrate the platform’s 10th anniversary. Through an interactive webpage, NAVER is showing the history of BAND, various use cases and data as well as behind-the-scenes stories from the BAND service team. The page also features the ‘My Meetup DNA’ online test to find out users’ meetup characteristics and ‘My BAND Report’ that shows users’ BAND activities.
“We believe that our efforts to monitor users’ needs and upgrade BAND according to the latest trends has grown the platform’s popularity over the past 10 years,” said Kim Joo-kwan, head of NAVER Group & CIC division, which operates NAVER’s community services.. “Based on NAVER’s unparalleled community service capability and insights, we will make BAND a place where all kinds of meetups can be hosted.”
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