Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the Q4 earnings call today that WhatsApp now has over 1.5 billion monthly users, and Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp seems smarter day by day. It was also reported that over 60 billion messages are sent every day.
When WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook it had only 420 million monthly active users but now that deal is bringing out the positives.
Zuckerberg also mentioned that Instagram and WhatsApp are the number 1 and no. 2 story sharing apps with each of them having 300 million users as compared to 178 million for Snapchat.
WhatsApp has new feature for businesses
January 20, 2018WhatsApp released its new app for businesses to connect with customers
People thought Facebook was crazy to pay such a high price. But messaging is the most critical and time-consuming activity on mobile. And if Facebook didn’t buy WhatsApp, Google probably would have, and messaging would be a two-horse race. Instead, Facebook is massively dominant everywhere but China, between the 1.3 billion-user Messenger and 1.5 billion-user WhatsApp.
Now Facebook is finally getting serious about monetizing WhatsApp with the recent launch of the WhatsApp for Business app. Facebook plans to charge business owners for additional commerce, customer service or broadcasting tools. And with such a massive audience, merchants will be clamoring for them.
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