Popular mobile messaging app Whatsapp has passed 600 million monthly active users. CEO Jan Koum announced this milestone via a tweet.
Now serving 600,000,000 monthly active users. Yes, active and registered are very different types of numbers…
— jan koum (@jankoum) August 25, 2014
WhatsApp crossed half billion user milestone back in April this year. In these 600 million users, 60 million active users are from India. And these numbers are rapidly growing. In April, it has 48 million in users India. Few months back, WhatsApp’s Neeraj Arora also confirmed that India is one of the fastest growing market for the company.
If we compare it with other rivals, WeChat has around 438 million monthly active users and mostly are from China. But the app is now growing in other countries. Viber has only 100 million active users and tango has only 70 million active users.
Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion and now wants to get financial returns from the app. Koum is against to put advertisement and they cannot grow the per year charge of the app. Facebook can use WhatsApp to get mobile internet users on Facebook. Few sources also revealed that Facebook scan WhatsApp conversations to target ads on Facebook for web. But this was not confirmed by the company.
In India, telecom operators also want WhatsApp to pay for using their Internet service. But TRAI rejected the proposal. Actually people have stopped using the SMS feature after they got these messaging app. So, telecom operators now see less revenue. This is the reason they want these messaging app to share the part of their revenues with them.
