WhatsApp has passed a significant milestone Monday. It is now being used by about 1 billion users around the world. This is good news to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO.
He led the acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion two years ago, on the assumption that it will grow to be among the world's most used communication medium. Even if this platform is not making money now, the social media network can certainly brag about its popularity.
Its active users are sending 42 billion messages and are sharing 1.6 billion photos every day. This followed the company's announcement of 900 million users last September, and right after Zuckerberg announced that the app has achieved a record of 1.59 billion active monthly users.
One billion users is a great achievement for WhatsApp but it also validated the company CEO's projections about it. He estimated that the app would eventually reach one billion users at the time when the number is only 450 million.
But the company's announcement of this milestone has raised other concerns. The announcement came right after Alphabet was examining its 2015 earnings for Q4 wherein Google's CEO announced that Gmail email service has now grown to over one billion monthly users.
These two companies are competing on the same fronts and Google seems to still have the upper hand with its long years of existence in the business. But Facebook is the more aggressive of the two in adapting newer technologies. Thus, FB now enjoys a significant lead in terms of messaging wherein the strongest competitor of WhatsApp is the company's own messenger.
The WhatsApp team, led by Jan Koum, CEO, was able to double its users partly because of its minimalist design and ad-free stance. Annual sales of the app, according to regulatory filings before FB acquisition were only $10.8 million. It rose to $15 million during the first half of 2014, just one year after.
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