The Wall Street Journal reports WhatsApp CEO and co-founder Jan Koum announced the figures on his Facebook page yesterday. The service has added another 100 million users since its last report in January.
WhatsApp has been growing rapidly at a rate of 100 million users every four months. This trend means that it will reach 1 billion users before the end of the year if the growth continues.
It makes the service larger than parent company Facebook’s own offering, Facebook Messenger. Messenger is only used by around 600 million of Facebook’s 1.4 billion total monthly users.
Bought by the company for $19 billion last year, Mark Zuckerberg has said before that WhatsApp could become an important contributor to Facebook’s business, especially when it reaches the 1 billion users mark.
The scale of WhatsApp can only really be appreciated when compared with other massive platforms. Instagram’s 300 million monthly users pales in comparison and Twitter’s 288 million is almost 75 percent less than WhatsApp’s consistent figures. Only Facebook can compete with its total of 1.4 billion monthly users.
WhatsApp has made it onto every platform, fuelling its growth. It is available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. The prospect of sending free messages over the Internet is what makes it so appealing to its massive userbase.
The app has also been expanding recently to include new features such as voice calling. This enables it to compete with established services like Skype so that it can grow even further in the future.
CEO Jan Koum was eager to remind us that the service actually has more registered users than the 800 million figure. He ended his Facebook post with the line “reminder for the press out there: active and registered users are not the same thing,” accompanied by a smiling emoticon.
