WhatsApp Achieves Huge Milestone, Crosses One Billion Active Users Globally

WhatsApp is probably amongst the top 5 applications you use on your phone daily and life without WhatsApp is quite boring to be honest. It helps you stay in touch with your friends, make groups and share files and even call other people through the service. Serving a simple purpose of connecting people through minimalistic design, WhatsApp has really become a rage amongst younger generation these days.

Since it’s inception in January 2010, the popular messaging application has grown exponentially over the years, breaking all records and creating new ones. It has been 6 years and WhatsApp has reached One Billion users globally.

This means nearly one in every seventh person on this globe is right now using WhatsApp on their device. WhatsApp is very proud of this achievement, and why not – They have been able to achieve this stupendous growth with mere 57 employees and that’s no mean feat!

WhatsApp’s blog post mentions, “We are proud of this milestone, and we’re humbled by the extraordinary ways all of you have used WhatsApp. Whether it’s sharing vital information during natural disasters or health emergencies, finding a date, growing a small business, buying an engagement ring, or seeking a better life – we’re honored to be a small part of what people are doing to make their lives and the lives of those around them better.”

WhatsApp Growth over the years

WhatsApp recently announced that there will no more be an subscription fee for the service and will be completely free from now on. Despite a very low fees, users have appreciated WhatsApp time and again and continue to use it everyday, every moment to be connected to their friends and family. It baffles everyone if WhatsApp is even generating revenues, since even after 6 years the application remains ad-free.

But this might change soon, as WhatsApp is launching a new service (monetization channel) where users will be able to communicate with the businesses of their choice.

Also, WhatsApp’s new version will have feature where user account data will be shared with their parent company Facebook!

Since Facebook owns WhatsApp now, Mark Zuckerberg congratulated Jan Koum, CEO and Co-Founder of Whatsapp, and Brian Acton, Co-Founder of Whatsapp, and all the teams in WhatsApp who have helped them reach this milestone. Zuckerberg commented that there are only a few services that connect a billion people, and their next ideal goal will be to make the connections between people a lot more seamless.

Jan Koum was quick to share interesting insights into WhatsApp’s portfolio. With just 57 engineers on-board at the moment, they are managing 1 Billion active customers monthly operating 1 Billion total groups, with 42 Billion messages sent every day, 1.6 Billion photos shared every day, 250 Million videos shared per day, all supported in 57 languages. To be honest, just 57 engineers managing end-to-end operations of such a huge messaging service deserve salute from us subscribers.

Now that there are competing services like Hike Messenger, Facebook’s own Facebook Messenger, Skype and Telegram etc., WhatsApp needs to up its game in terms of features and maybe introduce Facetime-like features for video calls, as seen in leaks.