WhatsApp, the popular messaging service, may soon fulfill the vision of its new overlord, Mark Zuckerberg.
The company, which was projected to attract 4 to 5 billion users over the next five years by the Facebook CEO, has just announced that it now has 600 million active users. While it's still far from the Zuckerberg-designated growth ceiling (one that is very ambitious considering Facebook itself only has 1.2 billion users), the company showed significant growth since being acquired by Facebook in a blockbuster $19 billion deal last February. WhatsApp gained about 150 million users since the Facebook acquisition, as it is starting to pull ahead from competing services like Kakao Talk and WeChat.
In a tweet, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum announced the growth of his free texting service. "Now serving 600,000,000 monthly active users. Yes, active and registered are very different types of numbers," he said.
This means that WhatsApp's user growth may actually be larger. Tech companies tend to focus on active users rather than total users. Active users are considered a more meaningful metric for gauging the popularity of a service, since the total number includes inactive and abandoned accounts. For instance, in Twitter's SEC disclosures prior to its IPO, it claimed that it has 232 million users. However, according to research firm Twopcharts, the total number of registered accounts was at 883 million. In the case of WhatsApp, the total number of users may be relevant since there are probably many people who send messages only when they travel. The service has a large segment of users who are avoiding SMS rates. These users probably only show up in WhatsApp's active numbers in a recurring fashion.
Nonetheless, WhatsApp's active users tend to send a lot of messages and photos. According to Statista, the average WhatsApp user sends an average of 1,267 messages, 13 voice messages and 40 photos per month. On the other hand, an average user also receives 2,267 messages per month.
Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp, which involves $3 billion in restricted stocks for employees, is expected to be completed late this year. The transaction has already been approved by US regulators. However, the acquisition is still up for review in Europe.
