Facebook recently has bought WhatsApp — one of the most famous platforms for sharing messages, videos and photos. It was the biggest deal made in the technological world. Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion. When Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, bought WhatsApp he said “The startup was on track for a million users.” This clearly explains his interest. Its a number one doesn’t come up with, while talking about network service other than Facebook.
Although a billion is a big number, but WhatsApp is already half way there. WhatsApp team recently announced that they have crossed the milestone of 500 million active users. Among these 500 million users 100 million joined during and after December 2013. And the 500 million people now share 700 million photos, billion text message along with 100 million videos. This number isn’t going to decrease as almost 25 million users join WhatsApp every month. WhatsApp is also considered to be the busiest network as it sends and receive 64 billion messages every day. After crossing 500 million target the former owner of WhatsApp said “On one hand, we were kind of expecting it. We got to 200 million users, 300 million users, 400 million users. It was going to happen sooner or later. But we think it’s an exciting number to share with the world and a good milestone to acknowledge what’s all been organic growth.” He also said we can move on if we want to, but the more important thing is that we get back to work. But getting back to “work” he meant moving on to Facebook.
According to Koum, the reason behind this leap and bound success is; the service has become common in countries like Brazil, Mexico, India and Russia. In other words, countries with emerging markets and large populations are the reason behind the quick expands of this messaging platform.
WhatsApp has been suffering due to some privacy issues along with its prolonged outage. Their irregular blackout created space for their rival messaging application such as Line and Telegram. But Koum says that Facebook purchase wouldn’t affect user privacy.