Kik's Bot Shop Surpasses 100 Bots

WATERLOO, Ontario, Aug. 3, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Kik Interactive, maker of chat network Kik, today announced that it has 111 featured bots in its Bot Shop, including brands such as AwesomenessTV, CNN, and Target. Kik makes it easy for anyone to build a bot. Since the company launched its Bot Shop in April, more than 20,000 bots have been created on Kik.

"While it's still early days for chatbots in the U.S., we're starting to realize the many possibilities inherent in this simple but powerful form of interaction," said Ted Livingston, founder and CEO of Kik. "Early results from bots featured in Kik's Bot Shop show that we are unlocking the potential of messaging in exciting new ways."

Bots are driving increased engagement on Kik, with users exchanging nearly 1.8 billion messages with bots to date. According to Kik's newly devised attention metric, users who interact with bots spend 32 percent more time chatting in Kik than non-bot users, and Kik's younger users are driving the growth in bot interaction overall, with 60 percent aged 13–19 years old, underscoring Kik's popularity with U.S. teens. Bot users skew slightly female, and more than 81 percent of bot users reside in the U.S., followed by Canada and the UK.

"We built the first responsive video bot on Kik in order to deepen our engagement with our Gen Z audience and couldn't be happier with our Kik partnership," said T.J. Marchetti, CMO at AwesomenessTV. "Kik has worked with us to get our experience right and experiment with content and campaigns that are truly chat-first."

The Bot Shop currently has three categories: entertainment, lifestyle, and gaming. The most successful bots incorporate customized suggested responses, a "mention" feature that allows bots to participate in conversation threads, and "invites," which let Kik users leverage their social graph to easily share their favorite bot experiences with friends.

"The possibilities for bots are endless, and we've only scratched the surface of what's possible in chat," said Omar Siddiqui, creator of Sequel, a bot development partner. "Kik has been a great partner, working closely with us and our customers to build great experiences, and listening to our feedback and incorporating it into their roadmap."

Here are a few examples of strong bot engagement on Kik:

• Sephora created a lifestyle bot that provides users with personalized makeup tips. The beauty brand also ran a sweepstakes where they offered gift cards when users completed a three-question survey. The company saw 40 percent of its user base complete the entire survey – considerably more than similar campaigns on other platforms.
• Vine produced an entertainment bot that pushes popular video content to users and saw 40 percent of users come through the Bot Shop and 60 percent from organic sources, including mentions from friends.
• Zurvival, a popular zombie invasion game, was the first bot to implement invites and now draws 20 percent of its new subscribers from the feature.

Kik's developer community continues to push the boundaries on bots, creating hundreds of new bots each week, working hand-in-hand with Kik to improve and simplify the bot creation process.

If you're interested in building a bot on Kik, please visit dev.kik.com.

About Bot Shop
The Bot Shop showcases bots on Kik built by third-party developers. Bots provide a low-friction way of delivering fun, engaging, and useful services through chat, and give developers the opportunity to reach Kik's 300 million registered users. For more information, please visit: bots.kik.com.

About Kik Interactive, Inc.
Kik Interactive, Inc., connects the world through chat. The company is the maker of Kik, a chat network with more than 300 million registered users where people can chat with friends and connect with chat-based services. Founded in 2009, Kik Interactive, Inc. is headquartered in Waterloo, with offices in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto. For more information, please visit:kik.com.

SOURCE Kik Interactive, Inc.

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