WhatsApp Exceeds Twitter’s Active User Base by Handling 20 Billion Messages in One Day


By: Ali Raza  |   April 18th, 2013   |   Mobile Apps, News, Smartphones, Social Media

Without a doubt WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging app in the world at the moment and it is serving a huge number of customers across the globe. Due to this reason every mobile manufacturer wants it on their app store and recently BlackBerry World added WhatsApp to its lates BB10 ecosystem. This still does not give a good idea about the sheer size of WhatsApp, but when the CEO of the cross-platform messaging app recently took the stage at AllThingsD’s Dive Into Mobile conference, he divulged that the number of active users they are handling at the moment has even gone beyond Twitter’s user base, which approximately caters 200 million users during a month. Koum also revealed that WhatsApp is currently catering 20 billion messages each day, of which 8 billion are inbound, whereas 12 billion are outbound.

 

This was indeed a remarkable achievement by WhatsApp, as just two years ago in 2011, the cross messaging app used to handle over 1 billion messages during a day. Later in August 2012, WhatsApp made it known that it had exceeded the 10 billion messages mark sent during a day and lately on New Year’s Eve, the company announced that it had achieved 18 billion messages mark in one day.

 

Previously, while talking to iPhoneinCanada, Koum was asked to share the number of users on the site and he replied “our numbers are a closely guarded secret which we don’t share with anybody.” This indicates that when it comes to numbers WhatsApp is quite serious about keeping things under wraps.

 

The cross-platform messaging app has been growing so swiftly that even big tech companies like Google and Facebook were unable to ignore it. In fact, the two companies were said to be in talks with WhatsApp in order to acquire it. Rumour also has it that Google has even made an offer of $1 billion to the messaging app, but so far none of these rumours received any confirmation.

 

On the other hand, WhatsApp has been able to make it large just on the basis of an annual subscription fee of $0.99 rather than depending on advertisement to earn money. It is positive about its future, as Koum said they are “looking forward to a world with billions of phones” in order to further expand this business model.

 

Koum said, “We do have a manifesto opposing advertising. We’re proud of that. Who likes advertising? We’re so bombarded with ads so much in our daily lives and we felt that smartphones aren’t the place for that. Our phones are so intimately connected to us, to our lives. Putting advertising on a device like that is a bad idea. You don’t want to be interrupted by ads when you’re chatting with your loved ones.”

 

Source: iPhoneinCanada

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *