WhatsApp is one of the most widely used messaging clients in the world today. If you have a friend or an acquaintance, the chances are that he/she probably uses this Facebook-owned IM service to communicate. A new stat published by WhatsApp sheds light on the extent of the platform’s usage. It is said that there are currently over a billion active users of WhatsApp who send 55 billion messages every day. Further, the company mentions that over 4.5 billion photos and 1 billion videos are shared on WhatsApp every day. This is quite the figure for a free IM app, and a feather in Facebook’s hat. The app supports 60 languages. In 2016, the company announced that the platform had 1 billion active users per month. But today, there are a billion active users per day, which speaks volumes of the growth seen by the app in just one year. The monthly active users now stand at 1.3 billion. It has already overtaken conventional forms of communication like phone calls, emails, SMS, and so on. Not to mention all the rival offerings that have bit the dust thanks to WhatsApp’s dominance in the market. However, Facebook has been struggling to monetize WhatsApp since it was acquired. When WhatsApp was launched initially, the developers proposed a $1/year subscription fee for the service. But given how the service was predominantly used in developing countries, this plan didn’t pan out. Currently, the WhatsApp team is said to be venturing into e-commerce to generate some revenue. While there’s no clarity on how Facebook and WhatsApp will achieve this, it’s probably going to be launching very soon. The company is also focused on adding new features to enhance user experience on the platform.
