WhatsApp growth is not slowing down as many believe, in fact if anything it has online accelerated. WhatsApp numbers are astonishing to say the least. They have now crossed 800 million monthly Active users of which 100 million new users have been added in last 3 months alone. Simply put they are adding over 1 million users every day!
Jan Koum co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp posted an update on his Facebook page announcing this milestone.
WhatsApp – now serving 800,000,000 monthly active users. Reminder for the press out there: active and registered users are not the same thing :)
Posted by Jan Koum on Friday, April 17, 2015
He highlighted the fact that 800 million are active and registered users who have accessed or used WhatsApp atleast once in a month!
If you look at users alone, meaning people who have WhatsApp installed on their phones, but haven’t used it, the number is far more than 1 billion. Their Android App alone has been downloaded over 1 billion times, and WhatsApp reached that milestone earlier in March 2015. Here is the tweet by Jan Koum from March 11, when he announced this milestone.
WhatsApp crossed 1B Android downloads. btw our android team is four people + Brian. very small team, very big impact. pic.twitter.com/sW4F9SlKKv
— jan koum (@jankoum) March 11, 2015
There is a reason why WhatsApp growth is only accelerating. First and foremost, after Facebook acquired them for whopping USD 19 billion, they have a parent company which has unlimited supply of cash. They do not have to worry about finances. Due to this, they are able to purely concentrate on bringing new features and innovations to WhatsApp.
In Jan of this year, they launched WhatsApp Web, where users can send and receive messages even through their Desktop. Earlier this month, they activated their much talked about free voice calling feature to all the users. And although, we found that their voice quality is not top-notch, I’d not be surprised if they have already become one of the global top 3 voice calling services given their incredible user base.
And if you look at some of the numbers that WhatsApp is churning out, you will not be left with any doubt that they are on their way to become the largest communication service in the world!
Have look at the graph below – These were their numbers in January of this year. WhatsApp was logging 30 billion messages per day – that average was over 50 percent higher than Global SMS volume.
Here is a look at Facebook’s time line over the years.
| June 2009 | WhatsApp founded by 2 Yahoo Employees Brian Acton and Jan Koum as messaging app which was alternative to SMS. This was first ad-free messaging client and launched at price of 99 cents (it also had 1 free year subscription) |
| April 2011 | Get $8 million Series A funding |
| October 2011 | WhatsApp touched 1 Billion messages per day milestone |
| August 2012 | WhatsApp grows to touch 10 Billion messages per day milestone |
| December 2012 | WhatsApp acquisition rumours are everywhere |
| January 2013 | They reach 18 billion messages per day milestone |
| April 2013 | It’s reported that WhatsApp has turned down acquisition offer from Google |
| June 2013 | WhatsApp announces they have 250 million active users. They create a record of processing 27 billion messages a day |
| October 2013 | 350 Million Active users / 20 million users in India |
| December 2013 | 400 Million users / 54 Billion messages processed at peak |
| February 2014 | Facebook Acquires WhatsApp For A Whopping $19 Billion |
| April 2014 | 500 Million users / 700 Million photos & 100 million videos processed in a day |
| August 2014 | 600 Million Active Users / 60 million users in India |
| November 2014 | 70 million Active users in India alone |
| January 2015 | 700 million Active users globally / 30 billion messages on average every day |
| April 2015 | 800 Million Active users globally |
[…] of 900 million Whatsapp users worldwide, around 65 million active users are from India, who share 3 billion messages every day on this […]