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It has been found that Naver’s Pholar and Kakao’s Plain, which were released last year to compete with picture-oriented social networking services such as Instagram, are failing to appeal to users.
According to market research firm Nielsen Korean Click, the number of those using the Android Pholar application dropped from 359,746 to 66,718 between March 2015 and February this year.
Naver started its open beta service for the Pholar messenger on March 24 last year. However, users were not enthusiastic from the early stage as it was very similar to Instagram. The number of users reached a high of 836,132 in June last year but has declined all the way since then. Naver explained that the actual number is greater when that of those using the app on PC is taken into account, but the number of them is estimated to be negligible.
Things are not much different for Kakao’s Plain. Kakao released the beta version of the hashtag-based mobile blog in April last year. The number of users of the Android Plain app increased from 31,310 to 91,510 between April 2015 and February this year but almost halved when compared to 166,035 that was recorded in August last year, when the regular service was released.