Whatsapp, one of the most popular online messaging services, has revealed a very important statistic to the Wall Street Journal that it has crossed 250 million active monthly users, which is incidentally bigger than Twitter which recently announced 200 million monthly active users. This makes Whatsapp one of the largest messaging platforms. In comparison, Skype has 280 million monthly active users, and for a 4 year old company such as Whatsapp, a number close to that is actually a great achievement.
Only recently did they announce that they have processed a record 27 billion messages per day. Whatsapp is available on almost all smartphone platforms and even basic phones like the ones from Nokia. But the only thing missing from it being ubiquitous is the presence on the desktop, but as the service is tied to your mobile phone number, it makes more sense as a replacement to the good old SMS service than a chat platform. With the ability to send multimedia without breaking a sweat unlike the poorly made MMS protocol, Whatsapp easily rose to prominence in this Internet age. With everyone using Whatsapp, it is poised to grow further as the smartphone market grows.
From our earlier article we recall that Whatsapp has not established a perfect business model yet and remains free on most platforms with exceptions to having a subscription model on some, and a paid app model on iOS. But then again, most of the times it ends up as a free app on a device, even bundled into handsets in some cases. While that plays a lot in getting into the hands of users, it also has ensured Whatsapp is getting money by being one of the top paid apps on the iTunes store and scaling up the business with that money and VC funding.
via WSJ