With 300M Monthly Users, WhatsApp Sprouts Like a Weed

WhatsApp is a proprietary, cross-platform instant messaging application with which you can send images, videos and audio media messages. It also works on all smartphone OSs. In April of this year, WhatsApp was ecstatic to announce that it had a monthly user base of 200 million.

If that sounds like quite an achievement, just wait. Since that time, WhatsApp has gained another 100 million users. As of today it has 300 million monthly users. In comparison to some of its rivals, we see that WeChat has 300 million registered users overall but just 195 million monthly active users in the first quarter of this year. Line and Viber sport 200 million registered users each, and KakaoTalk has 100 million registered users. WhatsApp even has a step up on Skype. In January, Skype had 280 million monthly users, but that includes PCs and laptops as well as mobile devices.

WhatsApp has also added a new feature: you can now use push-to-talk voice messaging. This was initially reported by All Things D and is said to bring the mobile messaging app in line with key rivals such as Facebook Messenger and China’s WeChat.

According to WhatsApp, its users share about 325 million photos a day. They send 11 billion messages a day and receive 20 billion a day. The major difference is likely due to the group chat facility. With these figures, it seems to be the clear market leader in most countries - with the possible exception of Japan and China.

WhatsApp is aggressively making a push in the emerging market place. The company appears to be focusing on south-east Asia. This is an area where low-income users can pay a small monthly fee to use data compressed versions of several apps including WhatsApp.

Here is an interesting fact. In the western world, WhatsApp is not free. If you want to use it in the U.S. after the first year, you will need to pay a whopping 99 cents a year. This is a little unusual. If you take into consideration that there are no ads or other items on your screen when using WhatsApp, that might be a good reason to shell out the 99 cents.