Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of speculation about the future of the Kik Messenger. Today we are excited to announce that we’ve finalized an agreement with Kik Interactive to acquire the Kik Messenger. I’m sure many of you have questions on what exactly this means so we wanted to put together a blog post to further explain some things directly to you - the millions of members of the Kik community.

First off, who are we?

MediaLab is a holding company that owns great internet brands like Whisper, Datpiff and others. We are a team of technologists, product managers, designers, and community builders who geek out over building cool stuff for large scale audiences. We believe that simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication, and that creating great products means maintaining great focus.

Why did we buy Kik?

Ted Livingston and the rest of the team at Kik have spent the last 9 years building something truly special. At the risk of sounding cheesy we are still passionate believers in what the internet promised to bring in its early days - a connected and shared experience amongst people regardless of geography or time zone. Kik is one of those amazing places that brings us back to those early aspirations. One where you can instantly connect with someone from halfway around the world and forge a connection through common interest. Whether it be a passion for an obscure manga or your favorite football team, Kik has shown an incredible ability to provide a platform for new friendships to be forged through your mobile phone. As a group of non conformists ourselves, we resonate with the kik ethos and felt this was a community we wanted to help continue.

What are our plans for developing Kik going forward?

Our first priority is to listen. We have some ideas (yes we want larger group sizes and the ability to remove inactive group admins too) but we don’t pretend to know everything or have all the answers. In fact, we’re counting on all of you to help point us in the right direction. If you have an idea on how to make Kik even better we want to hear about it so please email us at [email protected] We may not respond to every email (we’ll try) but we will read every single one. Beyond that we’re going to spend the next few months getting back to basics:

Making the app faster, more reliable, & less buggy (this is not a knock at the prior team who’s actually amazing; building software is just really really hard!) Making Kik the BEST place to connect with people who have similar interests whether it be in a group setting or 1-1. Eradicating spam bots and unwanted messages.

This means we’re going to need to focus on doing less things, but doing them really well. As part of that increased focus, we’ve made some decisions to pull back on a few features that we felt weren’t optimized. For the time being, we will be discontinuing the video chat toggle as well as the 3rd party bots platform. Don’t worry this doesn’t include RageBot. (In fact we’re hoping to announce some exciting news with the team behind RageBot in the very near future)

Now that a new company has bought the Kik messenger what does that mean for the Kin integration?

We are fans of Kin and believe in its long term potential. We are excited to further partner with Ted and his team on expanding the Kin integration and have plans to further support the project. We’ll have more to share on that front soon.

Are we committed to Kik for the long term?

Yes. We believe that Kik’s best days remain ahead of it. As part of that long term commitment, we need to ensure that we’re able to cover our expenses. So over the coming weeks we’ll be introducing ads to the service. While we know that some of you may not love that idea we plan to do it in a way that it is non-intrusive, and in no way takes away from what makes Kik great (no annoying full screen video takeovers or things like that).

We know that Kik has been home to millions of you for many years. While we’re really excited about all the potential, we promise to never lose sight of what makes Kik special. We don’t plan on screwing it up but just in case we’re veering off course, we’re counting on all of you to keep us honest so don’t hesitate to reach out!

Excited to embark on this journey together.

- The MediaLab Team