Research Of Pricing Strategy Of Mobile Instant Messaging Platform Based On Two-sided Markets

The rapid development of mobile Internet has promoted a new round of technological innovation and industry progress.The mobile instant messaging platform is the most representative application in the development of mobile Internet.Due to its convenience,timeliness and comprehensiveness,the mobile instant messaging platform quickly has gotten a lot of market share.Almost all mobile phone users are mobile instant messaging users so that telecom operators has lost part of market share and profits.The development of mobile Internet has helped the success of mobile instant messaging platform,also,its market strategy is very critical.The innovation of backward charge has attracted a large number of users and profits.Although the mobile instant messaging industry has been growing fast,the academic research on it is mostly limited to business models,information dissemination,regulatory policies and other fields,but short of the analysis of platform market behavior from a deeper theoretical level.As frontier of research of industrial organization theory,two-sided market theory accord well with market structure of many applications in the mobile Internet industry.So,this paper will research the pricing strategy based on two-sided market.Based on Armstrong's general model of two-sided market,this paper expands a pricing model that conforms to the characteristics of mobile instant messaging platform.Then the paper analyzes the pricing strategy of monopoly single platform about three kinds of charging models which called free charging,forward charging and backward charging,at the same time,competing two-platforms with different network structures is analyzed and some valuable conclusions are given.After theoretical research,further research is carried out by the case analysis of two most representative mobile instant messaging platforms—Mobile QQ and Wechat.It is hoped that these conclusions can be applied to the application of two-sided market theory and the healthy development of mobile instant messaging industry.