WhatsApp Gets Over 1 Billion Users

WhatsApp had recnetly made an announcement regarding the scrapping of its annual fee of $0.99. The company has now revealed that it has 1 billion users. The annoucement was made on WhatsApp’s official blog. This also implies that WhatsApp has gained 100 million users since its last announcement of having 900 million active users in September 2015.

As per a profile in WIRED Magazine the previous week, WhatsApp had shown that it had 990 million users at the time. This means that there has been an addition of 10 million users between late last month and today i.e within a span of just two weeks.

However, even after these impressive results, whether WhatsApp can generate revenue is again a question that remains unanswered. At the time the company was acquired by Menlo Park-based Facebook, Inc., the annual revenue of the company was $10.2 million, as per Bloomberg.

While revenue still remains an open question, it will be interesting to see how this massive user number impacts the playing field in a saturated messaging market.

The company is gearing to occupy its place in the Business-To-Consumer (B2C) communications market and is trying to put in place end-to-end encryption. This will bring it in competition with competitors including Telegram and Facebook Messenger.