After a 7-year run, WhatsApp made a milestone achievement at the beginning of February 2016. The instant messaging app users’ numbers hit more than a billion active users. There are only a handful of Companies in the world that can claim to have over a billion active users, and WhatsApp is one of them.
The instant messaging app founder Jan Koum and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed WhatsApp’s 1 billion-plus active users on Facebook. On its part, Facebook as a social network registers about 1.6 billion active users per month and 800 million users on its Messenger app.
WhatsApp is by far the world’s most popular instant messaging app, followed by Facebook Messenger and China’s WeChat coming in third place with about 650 million active users. WhatsApp founder Koum shared the latest WhatsApp daily usage stats on Facebook. It is also interesting that the company has maintained quite a conservative pace of hiring with just 57 engineers on its payroll, compared to the 50 employees it had when it was bought by Facebook back in February 2014.
This year could be another milestone year for WhatsApp given it has dropped its $0.99 annual subscription fee, and the fact that Facebook has given it a free reign to continue operating independently. The company said it will not start selling ads even though it has dropped the subscription fee. Instead, WhatsApp is strategizing on how to make money from businesses.
