BlackBerry Announces Plans To Make Money From BBM

I’ve been wondering for a while about how BlackBerry was going to make money from the monster growth that it has from BBM on BB10, Android, and iOS. Today their plan became clear. Here’s what it is from The Globe And Mail:

BlackBerry on Tuesday announced new details about its plan to generate cash from the popular service by rolling out a BBM Shop that will sell downloadable “virtual goods” such as stickers.

“At no point should monetization come at the expense of the user,” David Proulx, senior director of BBM Business Development, told reporters, adding there was no “one way” to monetize the service, and that the company would continue to experiment.

It will also open up the chat stream of users to sponsored posts from marketers who have created BBM Channels (landing pages similar to Facebook pages). There will also be “sponsored invites” where brands can send users subscribe requests, which will be geo-targeted and must be pre-approved by BlackBerry.

Corporate customers won’t be left out of this:

BlackBerry also confirmed details of its eBBM security suite, part of which will be called BBM Protect, which adds an extra layer of encryption to BlackBerry Enterprise Service customers for a fee, details and pricing for which are still under wraps, but will be coming in the summer.

Interesting. The question will be, will users be willing to pay for this. Time will tell on that front and investors will be watching.

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