One billion people are now using WhatsApp, the mobile messaging service that Facebook acquired little more than two years ago in a deal valued at $19 billion.
WhatsApp and Facebook announced their one-billion-user milestone this afternoon in a blog post. If you leave out apps that Google and its partners bundle with Android phones, this milestone likely makes WhatsApp the second-most popular app on Earth after the primary Facebook app. As WhatsApp puts it: “That’s nearly one in seven people on Earth who use WhatsApp each month to stay in touch with their loved ones, their friends, and their family.”
WhatsApp is relatively unpopular in the US, even though it was founded in Silicon Valley by two ex-Yahoo engineers, Jan Koum and Brian Acton. But across Europe and South America as well as in developing economies in Africa and India, it has proven to be an enormously popular way of sending and receiving messages, images, and video without paying steep texting fees to local wireless carriers. And in places where mobile infrastructure is thin, like India, it provides a viable alternative to social networks like Facebook.
Koum, Acton, and company have also added voice-calling to the app, letting people make calls over the Internet rather than through carriers. And like Facebook’s own messaging app, Facebook Messenger, it may eventually offer video calling.
Now the task for Koum and company is to find a viable source of revenue. Thanks to the Facebook acquisition, they have ample runway, but the particulars of their business model are still evolving. Two weeks ago, the company dropped its $1-a-year subscription fee (which only kicked in after one, anyway), saying it planned to make money through businesses that use the app to communicate with consumers.
The idea is that you’ll use WhatsApp to make restaurant reservation, book plane flights, and the like. It’s a market that Facebook is also exploring through Messenger, and that an app called WeChat has already mastered in China.
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