WhatsApp Now Has Reached 1.5 Billion Monthly Users

As part of his company’s fourth quarter earnings call held recently this week, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive officer of Facebook, also took the opportunity to reveal that WhatsApp now has reached 1.5 billion users on a monthly basis, with a face melting 60 billion messages sent every day. 

Some may remember that back in July of last year, WhatsApp had reported of hitting 1.3 billion monthly users, as well as 1 billion daily active users. The insanely popular chat messaging service has since bettered that number by about a couple of hundred million monthly users in just half a year’s time. 

Zuckerberg must be feeling good right now, particularly about Facebook’s decision to acquire the WhatsApp brand for a sum of over $19 billion back in 2014. Of course, the world’s most widely used social media platform could be forgiven for exercising a little bit of caution back then -- considering that WhatsApp only had 450 million active users monthly and 315 million active users daily at that time.

But fast forwarding to three years later, WhatsApp is now the second most popular Story sharing platforms in the face of the planet, next only to Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook. About a couple of months ago, it was reported that Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status had 300 million active users daily. For context, rival Snapchat has 173 million active users daily as of the end of September last year.

In this day and age wherein just about everything is connected through digital means, chat messaging has become bigger and bigger. And the great thing about today’s messaging services is not that they are not just a means for sending messages to other people, but as a fun and quick way to tell stories and share experiences as well, even in real time. Facebook even believes that in due time, the total volume of social media posts on Instagram Stories or WhatsApp Status will surpass the amount of feed posts.

Apart from being busy improving its WhatsApp and Instagram brands, Zuckerberg’s team is also continuing to reinforce its Messenger service. Facebook is said to be exploring ways in which enterprises can have easily and conveniently communication with their customers or target audience. The social media giant has already rolled out a plug in for Messenger so that consumers can initiate live chats with businesses via their official websites. Facebook also stated that over 2 billion messages have already been exchanged between enterprises and customers on a monthly basis.