WhatsApp crosses 800mn users mark, targeting 1 bn in few months

On Friday, Jan Koum, founder of WhatsApp said that the messaging app has reached over 800 million active users globally. According to him some 100 million users joined the club since January 2015 and the user base is expected to reach over 1 billion by the end of this year. We all know Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19 billion in February 2014. Whatsapp The application is not generating revenues as Mark Zuckerberg has already said that he wants to focus on strengthening the service area before he thinks about earning something out of it. Zuckerberg also said that he expect WhatsApp to be an important revenue generator for his business, but he won’t consider it a revenue generator unless 1 billion users subscribe to it. It seems he wouldn’t have to wait much longer as the year still has 8 more months and he is only short of 200 mn subscribers. However, both Zuckerberg and founder Koum didn’t mention clearly that how WhatsApp is going to generate revenue and Koum also seem to opposing the idea of putting ads on a messaging service that may annoy the smartphone users. Whatsapp is facing massive competition right now with apps like Viber, Tango, BBM and Kik and none of these apps has user base as big as WhatsApp. Few days ago, WhatsApp was updated and a voice calling feature was added into it for selected users. The feature is still in a its test phase and it can be enabled in few steps. It took 8 years for Facebook to reach 1 billion users, but it looks like WhatsApp set to achieve the same target in about 6.