LINE, the super-popular social app from NHN Japan, is now counting 55 million users, up from 50 million a few weeks ago.
According to the company, 25 million users are located in Japan.
NHN Japan also discloses that LINE Birzzle, the first social game using the newly introduced LINE platform, racked up 5 million downloads worldwide, in just 3 weeks. That title caused a splash last month by getting 2 million downloads in just 24 hours after launch.
On August 16, I tweeted out the following screenshot of the Japanese App Store ranking for free apps, which shows that five of the top 10 apps were based on LINE:
In order to keep this momentum, NHN Japan also announced that it started a horoscope/fortune-telling service on the LINE platform today.
Dubbed LINE Uranai, the service is based on the original LINE app and offers Tarot, love horoscopes, etc. from NHN Japan itself and several third parties:
Some of the contents are free while users must get LINE Coins for others. LINE Uranai is currently available on Android only.
N. B.:
Online horoscopes and fortune-telling services have always been quite a big business in Japan. Tokyo-based Zappallas is just one example: the company’s core business is offering said services, it’s listed, and currently counts over 1.2 million mobile subscribers for its paid fortune-telling service (on feature phones).
So it’s not a big surprise NHN Japan wants a piece of that pie, too.
