Recently acquired by Facebook, arguably the most popular mobile messaging App WhatsApp is now proudly boasting 600 million monthly active users.
The CEO and founder Jan Koum announced this staggering number of active users on twitter.
It is interesting to see how WhatsApp grew from 300 million active users to 600 million active users within one year. WhatsApp has a very simple business model, they charge $1 per year after a year of free use. Considering it has such an active user base the price is very cheap. CEO and founders have always been strong with the idea of keeping the App reasonable and without any advertisements or games or any other in-app purchases. But Facebook did acquire this App at a very staggering price of $19 billion, without ads or games or stickers like other messaging apps how Facebook makes money out of this App is still a question left unanswered.
On the other hand other there are tons of messaging apps which were released before and after this huge acquisition, most won’t thrive for long but there are hardly few competitors like WeChat, Tango, Line and Viber. WeChat has a huge user base from China of about 400 million active users, Tango with about 50 million active users and Viber going strong with 100 million active users. Viber is not just competing with WhatsApp as a messaging service but also trying to capture the Skype user base with its heavy voice chat & call features in their messaging app.
Now serving 600,000,000 monthly active users. Yes, active and registered are very different types of numbers…
— jan koum (@jankoum) August 25, 2014
