WhatsApp Surpasses 400 Million Active Users

Popular cross-platform messaging service WhatsApp has today announced that it now has over 400 million people using the service on a monthly basis, with 100 million active users added in the last four months alone. This means that the service is now even bigger than Twitter, which has 230 million active users, though it’s still well behind Facebook’s 1.2 billion active users.

Whatsapp icon vector

WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum told AllThingsD:

“We want to steer the conversation to be about active users, not registered users,” said WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum. “We’re a bit fed up and frustrated about people talking about registered users. We think it’s important for us as a leader in the space to speak up and be ethical.”

WhatsApp has just 50 employees, and most of them are engineers. It is amazing how they have arrived at this point without spending a dollar on targeted ads or big marketing campaigns. While companies like Snapchat have remained silent about how many active users they have, WhatsApp is one of the few that are openly sharing how many people are truly using the service.

The startup has also shared some interesting WhatsApp user-stories in the official blog post, such as this one:

There was the woman from New Zealand who moved to South Africa to complete her PhD. The week before she left to go back home, she met the man of her dreams. Despite living thousands of miles apart, she told us that WhatsApp has allowed them to feel closer than ever.

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