Ever since Facebook acquired WhatsApp, it became a different platform altogether. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg today announced that WhatsApp now has 1.5 billion monthly active users who're exchanging 60 billion messages on a daily basis. He also added that Instagram is the most popular platform for status sharing, which is followed by WhatsApp. During the earning calls for Q4 2017, Zuckerberg announced this news and also stated that both Instagram and WhatsApp dethroned Snapchat Stories in terms of Daily Active Users (DAUs) which has only 178 million active status posts on a daily basis.
When Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, it had only 450 million monthly active users and 315 million daily active users. To recall, back in July, WhatsApp had 1.3 billion monthly users and 1 billion daily active users.
Talking about the Status feature, both Instagram and WhatsApp now have over 300 million daily active status users, but Instagram comes on the top place, followed by WhatsApp an Snapchat. For the unaware, Facebook lifted the Status feature from Snapchat itself, but the latter is now struggling to compete with all the Facebook-owned platforms.
In order to unify its product lineup, Facebook introduced Status feature on its own platform, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Also, during the earnings call, Zuckerberg stated that social media posting on Stories would soon exceed that of feed posting as per Facebook's research. This news is reported by Techcrunch.
When WhatsApp was independently working on its own, it never thought of monetising the platform, but after Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp, rumours about Facebook monetising the platform increased. And more recently, WhatsApp introduced 'WhatsApp Business' platform, as its first instance to charge business owners for additional customer service and updating them with the latest info on the platform.
Already, WhatsApp Business platform has seen a massive demand in just two weeks since the launch. Big names such as Netflix have already started notifying the customers about latest TV shows, etc. And rightly so, WhatsApp will face a huge demand from merchants for the WhatsApp Business program, thanks to the massive user base. In India alone, WhatsApp has over 200 million monthly users, and the company is expected to launch payments service for the Indian audience this month.
