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WhatsApp Is Well On Its Way To A Billion Users
redletterdave (2493036) writes "In just two months since Facebook dropped $19 billion to buy WhatsApp, the five-year-old mobile messaging app on Tuesday announced its its active user base has grown to more than half a billion people. This is not the first time that an app has seen a major pop in users after it was acquired by Facebook: When Facebook bought Instagram in April 2012, the service boasted some 30 million users. In one month after the deal, Instagram gained 20 million new users. By July, Instagram grew to 80 million active users. WhatsApp seems to be having a similar growth spurt, gaining roughly 25 million users each month since the Facebook deal was announced."
It seems that when Facebook buys a company, they gain more users instead of less... This is going against what almost everyone here predicted would happen with both services: That no one wanted Facebook in their lives...
This looks like a "messaging" app. It seems like the only point is to get around the few remaining billing plans on the planet that don't have unlimited text messaging. Am I insane thinking that this market niche will only exist for another year, at most? I personally don't know anybody who has to pay for messaging, but I understand that some people in other countries still have to (for now)...
I don't respond to AC's.
I don't see why such growth should occur. Probably Facebook automatically creating "shadow accounts" for Facebook users.
This is going against what almost everyone here predicted would happen with both services: That no one wanted Facebook in their lives...
I think that statement is accurate.
What did not happen was those apps becoming Facebook. If you didn't know Facebook owned them, you might not guess it otherwise... Facebook has only been used to steer users to those apps, not to change what they do.
The same will happen for Oculus.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm sure Farcebork brought them some more visibility than they had, but what evidence is there that even most of them are actual bona fide new users, rather than just new accounts? FB has a history of having a significant percentage of their "accounts" being little more than "likebots" to float their "pay for likes" scheme.
(See VSauce's channel on YT for a rather telling commentary on the FB "like" scam).
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
I know a lot of people who uninstalled it the moment it was bought by FB. None that installed it.
Unsurprising I'm 5 users myself.
1 in 7 people on Earth uses it and I know none of them. And I know people in India
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Half of something is just as close to 0 too, they're gonna need to try very hard to gain another 500 million users.
I made an app! Shoutium
And then the ads start. And then there's another messaging app to go to. And then then exodus starts, because there's no particular cost in moving from one free messaging app to a different one, while ads are annoying. I wonder if the new popular messaging app will get bought by Google this time for billions of dollars.
Yep. That's why I no longer use google.
It's always fascinating to find yet another way one differs from hundreds of millions or even billions of other people.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
They will have 1/7th of the earth's population using whatsapp?
I think there is funny business in those numbers.
Exactly. Funny and not funny.
Why do people accept what Facebook says about the number of users? There are problems: 1) No independent verification. 2) Conflict of interest. If Facebook claims more users, Facebook makes more money. 3) Many "users" are people who merely tried something and never came back.
Than actual active members. I've had whatsapp installed on a phone for a couple years, and haven't used it in...well, a couple years. Am I in those statistics?
You should just take your heads out of that hole you have it in and look at other countries of the world.
There is a couple of things you should know:
1. No, non unlimited SMS plans are going nowhere in many places and SMS cost so much in some countries that you may pay for your data plan by sending 100-200 SMS a month.
2. Whatsapp has market penetration of over 90% in some countries, and many people from Latin America, many European countries (And I think Asia too, although I'm not too sure whats the scenario there, I know in India is wildly used) will tell you they don't know anyone who doesn't use whatsapp (unless they know an american). I have over 95% of my contacts in Whatsapp, and I haven't received ANY SMS in the past 3-4 years, unless it's spam or a message from the telco letting me know I have a lost call.
3. Whatsapp is very convenient for anyone that lives abroad or has friends abroad, which is becoming an increasing trend (probably in many cases but the US too)
4. Whatsapp is fast, many criticise how simple the app is, but this makes the app very fast, specially in low end phones and thats the reason many use it.
5. You can form groups which is very convenient, send photos, etc which makes it much more convenient than SMS once you get used to it.
I may add to this, when you're traveling it usually costs ~$1/day for some megs of data roaming (5-50mb i've seen), which is more than enough to send lots of messages, while ONE roaming SMS may cost the same. Again, probably not very common in the US to travel abroad, but think about Europe how much people travel and live in any other European country other than their own and where they have most of friends/family. You'd use Whatsapp (or something similar) lots more if you had to pay roaming charges to send SMS across states in the US.
Whatsapp has no loyalty. I've looked at the alternatives out there. Apps like Viber, Line, Telegram etc. They get massive boosts every time Whatsapp has an outage. Within seconds their adoption rates spike.
Simply put, The moment something goes wrong, someone comes with something better, and that the switching costs are so low, people will leave. Remember, its also not a winner-take-all market since the products are close to or are free for use. This means while if you could capture the entire value of the user for that service it may be worth X, but because they still chat on sms, msn, skype, etc, they are worth a fraction of X.
Instagram and Whatsapp purchases by facebook are a knee-jerk reaction to them missing the mobile boat the first time around.
This observation deserves beaucoup points. More and more we live in a world where headlines and press releases are treated as news, accepted prima facie without much vetting or scepticism, a lot of it propagated by websites trying to generate clicks. Slashdot for one is certainly not blameless in this racket. Digging a little behind this story, does it mention how many people have stopped using WhatsApp since the buyout? Fairly mum about that, but pretty sure theyr'e still counting those people too.
Like so much in IT, it's hard to tell what's what and what's not.
WhatsApp has groups, just like channels on irc. That's the killer feature for me. (also, no adds, minimalist, just works)
One very important feature is missing though; now only the group founder can administer the group. This right should be shareable to others. Other nice feature would be ability to tunnel the messages to other protocols.
Good observation...I myself see various whatsapp accounts for people I have in my phonebook which have actually stopped using it, in fact have just tried it for a few days and stopped. Most people will just stop using a service and will not clean up their accounts and delete/disable them.
These companies know this and take advantage of it.
Facebook chatting app Is Well On Its Way To A Billion Users
FTFY
Time for regulators to step in. What if telco's kept their clients hostage by not letting them call clients on other networks? That would be insane. Same here.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Very popular here in Finland also. Super handy when going abroad, as you can use it through free wifis and do't have to worry about roaming. Also popular as a way to keep in touch with friends abroad. I guess US people don't go abroad that much, or have friends outside their own country.
in fact, one day Facebook might decide to give every FB user a free WhatsApp account, "for their own convenience".
Suddenly WA gains several billion users, including those who do not use FB anymore. Share price goes up, Slashdot talks about it, Reality continues to give not one fuck.
... not a billion.
International SMS is becoming free on most cellular plans
yes, first thing this morning I also got my share... ... and every (other) day or so, they push some secret buttons to ignore cookies, settings and preferences to land users on the FUCKING beta?
why the fuck someone at slashdot still think that most will be interested in this monstrous beta?
they are free to go ahead but l PLEASE leave me out of it.
as said before, every time a get landed on beta, I will add 10 posts to each topic that day just boldly stating
FUCK the FUCKING beta!!!!!!!!!
#2
I literally don't know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I have two teenage daughters who do all the snapchatting and whatnot and they didn't even know what WhatsApp even was. None of their cousins scattered around the western world and attending many different universities know what it is. So the only way that WhatsApp is able to have anything even close to 1 billion users is if it is predominant in non western countries.
And as proof of where these kids lay on the spectrum of being leaders of technology, nearly all of them have abandoned, or severely cut back on their Facebook.
#3
are fucking idiots. They flock like lemmings to the "hot" app of the week then the morons are so stupid they forget they used it in the first place and never return, like Facebook. I beginning to think that Bush with his irrational and hateful rants demanding the Internet be shutdown was correct. People in the US are not smart enough to use the Internet. As long as we allow Republicans access, they will continue to make billionaires out of morons.