Today at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, the CEO of Facebook-owned WhatsApp confirmed few important things about the future of popular messaging platform Whatsapp. He confirmed that whatsapp would be ditching $1 annual subscription fees in coming days. Not just this, Whatsapp will also start testing business accounts to let business interact with customers.
Whatsapp was free for first 1 year and then it asks users to pay $1 per year for renewing its subscription. Although, this was not uniform across the globe. Back in 2014, Whatsapp confirmed free renewal for Indian consumers and it didn’t ask for any subscription fee for many Whatsapp users using Android devices.
While Whatsapp is gearing to reach 1 billion active users mark, we know it is now more serious to think about earning from its potential. Even if there is no confirmation on ads, business account is something which could be a way to monetize this messaging platform.
Koum confirmed that Bank of America and American Airlines will be two possible business to test Business account on its messaging platform.
With this new addition, Whatsapp will now become a platform very similar to Facebook Messenger. But we just have little information about that. Whatsapp is planning big to monetize its platform without running the users’ experience or taking risk with users’ privacy.
