Marco Polo had a 1,147% increase in new sign-ups last month as more people complied with social ... [+]
Marco Polo, a video messaging app dubbed by some reviewers as the ‘Snapchat for old people,’ is ticking up its user count in the time of social separation. As COVID-19 forces more people to shelter at home, the app has added 1.1 million downloads to its 10 million all-time count on Google Play. This adds up to a 1,147% increase in new sign-ups and a 145% increase in activity over the past few weeks, according to app founders Michal and Vlada Bortnik.
Celebrities are certainly on board. Before singer Pink announced on social media that she and her son tested positive for COVID-19, she told her 7.7 million Instagram followers that she was using the Marco Polo app to organize a virtual happy hour with her family.
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😚A post shared by P!NK (@pink) on Mar 21, 2020 at 3:09pm PDT
A few days later, rapper Ice-T took to Twitter to say that he’d used the app before quarantine but that it especially did the job for him to keep in touch with family and friends.
The real secret to Marco Polo’s success may lie in its simplicity. Unlike bandwidth-sucking real-time video chat platforms like Zoom or Apple’s FaceTime, video messages are exchanged more like text messages. Glitchy broadband won’t disrupt the conversation and recipients are free to respond in their own time. Voice-changing options such as “helium” and “macho man” and to the fun, and Instagram-style filters are also available. But it’s the emotional benefit of seeing a human face that makes the husband and wife team behind Marco Polo believe their app’s growth will continue beyond the current pandemic.
“Once people start using Marco Polo they feel happier,” Vlada Bortnik says, citing a January 2020 study Joya Communications conducted with Brigham Young University-Idaho. After two weeks “74% of users said their mood was better.”
The study goes on to note that “Marco Polo users were significantly less lonely, exhibited fewer depressive symptoms, and had higher life satisfaction than Snapchat users.”
Notably, Snapchat, with 218 million daily active users, also posted increased user engagement in March, with a 50% increase in voice through the app.The central functions between Marco Polo and Snapchat are the same, but Bortnik points to what she believes are specific advantages of her four-year-old platform.
Unlike Snapchat, “there are no social comparisons, no counts of likes,” she says. “You can just talk, you don’t have to worry about ‘how many likes is Polo going to get?” Bortnik also notes that Marco Polo is ad-free and private, with no feeds full of strangers to scroll through. “It’s really for your closest friends,” she says. “It’s not for the whole world to see.”
The platform is intended for a more intimate audience allowing for a more authentic way of communicating, Bortnik says. You won’t find over-the-top effects that turn you into a dog, she points out as an example.
“You’re talking to your mom, you’re talking to your sisters, so there’s not that need to put on a show. You can just be yourself,” Bortnik says. The app is less of a “highlights reel of one’s life” or a place to showcase feigned happiness, and more like the “Finstas,” the ironically named “fake Instagram” accounts in which social media users show their “real” selves. Bortnik says she hopes communication on Marco Polo takes on a more casual and “real” tone.
This hope is the reason Bortnik and her husband began working on the app in 2012 as a way for their kids to keep up with relatives in their home countries of Ukraine and Poland. From this family project grew their company, Joya Communications, a 38-person team located across 15 U.S. states, Canada and India. A premium version of Marco Polo which allows users to store messages is available for $9.99 a month, but the company has yet to generate revenue. As the team works on money making ideas, it’s in a good place financially. Since its $20 million Series B round of funding led by Benchmark in 2016, its largest to date, Joya Communications has raised $27 million in private equity.
Long before this recent streak of popularity, Bortnik says her mission has been to cure the existing epidemic of loneliness, which is being exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Social distancing is so important and the mental health piece of it cannot be forgotten,” Bortnik says. “Now with everybody social distancing, I’m concerned about the increase in mental health issues that we’re going to start seeing.”
Marco Polo App
Snapchat and Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, have responded to recent mental health concerns by providing access to experts. Bortnik notes that for many, especially those on the frontline of the crisis, hearing from loved ones can make their days a little easier, Bortnik would like to help facilitate that communication.
“We’re asking everybody in the Marco Polo community to pick three people every day to check up on and to make sure that somebody who’s in need, somebody who’s isolated can know that somebody’s looking out for them.” So far, 75,000 users have pledged. Even though being most popular isn’t one of her goals, she’s confident organic growth will continue to spread by word of mouth.
As for Bortnik and her family, they continue to use the app mostly for language lessons.
“My husband’s family still lives in Poland so we use Marco Polo with all of them. His mom is so cute, every day she sends a little Polish lesson for my kids,” Bortnik says.
