WhatsApp Hits 800 Million Users — 1 Billion by Year-End?

WhatsApp now has 800 million monthly active users, after adding about 100 million since January.

 

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WhatsApp now has 800 million monthly active users, continuing a pace of growth that may put the mobile messaging app on track to hit one billion users later this year.

Jan Koum, the CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp, revealed the numbers on his Facebook page late Friday. The app, which Facebook bought last year for $22 billion, has added 100 million active monthly users roughly every four months since August, when it had 600 million users. In January, WhatsApp announced that it reached 700 million.

WhatsApp has more users than any other similar app, including Facebook Messenger, and has become an alternative to text messaging for many people around the world. WhatsApp recently launched a feature allowing users to take calls through the app.

It took Facebook roughly eight years to reach the one-billion mark. Facebook now boasts about 1.4 billion monthly users, while its Messenger has about 600 million.

Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously said he expects WhatsApp to contribute to the company’s bottom line, but not until it reaches roughly a billion users. In January, he reiterated that he expects WhatsApp to be an important contributor to Facebook’s business.

“What I’d say around messaging is we’re pretty early in that cycle,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “We are about where Facebook was in around 2006 or 2007, where, at that point, Facebook is really just a consumer product. There were no businesses in the ecosystem.”