Facebook recently announced its Q2 2017 earnings. In this announcement, the social media giant stated that the messaging app WhatsApp now boasts 1 billion daily users. WhatsApp Status, the Snapchat Stories clone, also reached 250 million daily users. Furthermore, WhatsApp users are currently sending 55 billion messages and 4.5 billion photos every day.
WhatsApp currently supports 60 languages and has rapidly expanded its global user base by being free, easy to use, and having features lacking in traditional SMS. It surpassed the 1-billion-monthly-user mark in February 2016. Now, this is a great achievement, only bettered by the fact that WhatsApp now has 1 billion users daily.
Also, the rapid growth of WhatsApp Status is worth a closer look. As of the beginning of May, WhatsApp Status had 175 million uses. This means that it has added 75 million daily users in less than two months. By contrast, Snapchat currently has 166 million daily users. As of April, Instagram Stories has 200 million users. This means that WhatsApp Status has surpassed both Snapchat Stories and Instagram Stories in daily use for the comparable feature.
Despite this, it is hard to say if WhatsApp’s popularity will steal a significant part of Snapchat’s audience. As a matter of fact, more than half of Snapchat’s users are not daily Facebook users. Furthermore, half of these Snapchat users are not daily Instagram users. However, this does show that there is still a huge market to fill in the world of ephemeral content.
According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company is still early on the monetization side for the app, and both Facebook and WhatsApp are currently building teams to address how the app can eventually make money. After all, monetizing an app that has 1 billion daily active users could result in staggering profits. As it is, it will certainly be interesting to see how WhatsApp and WhatsApp Stories continue to row in the future, and if Snapchat can make moves to compete against WhatsApp and Instagram.
WhatsApp Users Growth Timeline
- In 2017, WhatsApp clocked 1 billion daily users.
- The app hit 1.5 billion users in January 2018.
- In February 2020, WhatsApp announced that it had clocked 2 billion daily users[1]
- In 2021, the app hit 2.2 billion users
References
- WhatsApp has 2 billion daily users: source.
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