More Than One Billion People Use Facebook's WhatsApp Service Every Day

Facebook has announced that more than one billion people use its instant messages and voice calling app WhatsApp every day. To put that in perspective, there are 7.5 billion people on this planet. And Facebook, whose marquee service itself is used by more than two billion people every month, says that 13.3 percent of the world's population is using Whatsapp every day.

Method behind the...

[unixisc]

Nice way to insult above 13% of the world's population!

The reason for this, of course, is that WhatsApp is the most cross-platform multimedia messaging service above SMS. It's not only there on iOS and Android, but also on Windows 10 Mobile, some Blackberry versions and I've even seen it on legacy phones. And with the most recent versions, it supports both audio and video internet calling, which is very handy if one wishes to call people overseas but doesn't want to pay for a phone plan overseas. Whi

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[unixisc]

Fair point. You are describing a business case. I was describing a personal case: I have family members that have both Galaxies and iPhones, and very often, we like to share not just messages, but also photos & videos. My parents struggle w/ email, but have somewhat figured out at least how to VIEW things in WhatsApp

For what you are describing, it seems pretty inappropriate. Like you said, email is more suitable, and even something like Skype.

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[k6mfw]

Back to you, Chet..

nobody under 55 knows what you are talking about.

More Lies

[avandesande]

They also claimed that 85% of all people over 15 in USA use facefart at least one time per month

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[Sindar By Choice]

They also claimed that 85% of all people over 15 in USA use facefart at least one time per month

I think it's closer to 90%.

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[avandesande]

It's not meant to be funny. That was a trick you would do at camp while someone was sleeping, give them a facefart injection. It's very similar to the online experience.

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[unixisc]

It's one thing to dislike FaceBook, and I don't care much for it. WhatsApp is another story altogether, which is why FaceBook bought them!

6.5 billion people have common sense

[Oswald McWeany]

The good news is 6.5 people have better sense.

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[unixisc]

I have WhatsApp, but I don't have a FaceBook account connected to the same email or Phone number. So even if FaceBook has my contacts, how exactly do they put their advertizers in front of me? I don't see ads in my WhatsApp app, nor on the PC web equivalent.

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[GuB-42]

The good news is 6.5 people have better sense.

Or affordable SMS.

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[Oswald McWeany]

The good news is 6.5 people have better sense.

Who are you to call a little person "0.5"??!

It's not a little person. It's a man with split personality disorder.

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[unixisc]

He got it right in the title, even if he missed it in the body

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[unixisc]

If it is, why isn't there something in TrueOS's AppCafe that lets me view WhatsApp on my laptop, and type my messages from there - like I can w/ a Wintel PC?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[CanadianMacFan]

At least you made sure your relatives had a well provisioned Thanksgiving.

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[Major_Disorder]

...I only use slashdot and carrier pigeons. This might explain the drop-off in invitations to family Thanksgiving.

At least you made sure your relatives had a well provisioned Thanksgiving.

It is really hard to stuff carrier pigeons.
Don't ask me how I know.

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[CanadianMacFan]

You don't stuff the pigeons, you stuff them into the turkey.

Point of View

[sanf780]

I am amazed that there are over thousand million active mobile phone lines. Wow, mobile internet is almost everywhere.

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[Solandri]

There are about 2.4 billion smartphone users in the world [wikipedia.org]. One would assume most if not all of them have access to mobile (or WiFi) Internet since aside from side-loading, that's the only way to get apps onto the phone. And apps are what distinguishes a smartphone from a dumb phone.

The more interesting thing to me is that there are over 2 billion Facebook users, and you would assume there's a high correlation between that group and smartphone users. Yet only 1 billion of them choose to use Facebook's

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[ausekilis]

I'm more interested in the breakdown of these "users". How many are pets? Bands? Brand names? Corporations? TV Shows? "collector" accounts that only spew reddit images? Deities? Magazines?

I have no doubt Failbook is popular. I just think that the numbers are inflated by including the accounts that aren't directly tied to a living being. I'm pretty sure whoever runs the "God" Failbook page has at least one other account...

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[unixisc]

The story was about WhatsApp users, not FaceBook users. That number has to be of living people, since no one, no matter how much s/he loves the dog, will get it not just a phone, but a phone# and account. This is an app that one installs on a phone in order to be able to talk cheaply to people. One has to have a live phone w/ an associated phone# in order to use WhatsApp: it just won't set up if it's just a phone w/o a carrier.

Very different from FaceBook, where one can open a fictitious account just f

Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in India. I can't name a single person that doesn't use WhatsApp. Even "dumb phones" have it. No one uses SMS.

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[no1nose]

Why don't they use SMS in India? Here in the US we have SMS and iMessage as the huge players. Does Whats App use a different network that is lower cost?

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[Hadlock]

WhatsApp allows voice and video calls over wifi for free
 
I live in the US and I don't know anyone that uses iMessage. Everyone (iphone, android) has WhatsApp, and it works with all long distance/international users on the first try. Plus unlike SMS you get a delivery confirmation and read receipt for every message. Only a very rare few friends and family don't use WhatsApp.

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[KiloByte]

Poland. Have yet to meet a single person who uses WhatsApp.

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[Paradise Pete]

Poland. Have yet to meet a single person who uses WhatsApp.

What do they use? In Thailand Line dominates. Everybody uses it. you'd be hard pressed to find a single phone that doesn't have it installed.

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[dugancent]

I don't work in tech (I'm in healthcare) but I have WhatsApp on my iPhone. Every single Indian coworker I have a contact for pops up.

Eastern US.

How much revenue?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

When it came out it wanted 1 $ a year. I think I snagged a deal of 3$ for 5 years. How much it costs to provide the service, does it generate any revenue, are there any profits?

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[sanf780]

WhatsApp started on BlackBerry, then iPhone, and finally Android. The start price for the application was 5 USD for single perpetual license in the early days. The 1USD/year came years later, with the first year being free.

I read somewhere the future plan to monetize WhatsApp is to let merchants into the game. As in let merchants send you promotional messages. Note that Facebook knows where you have been, so you should see the strategy of targeted marketing in play. Targeted ads are well paid.

The plan to m

How many ...

[Causemos]

How many of them are bots?

The power of "free"

[petes_PoV]

more than one billion people use its instant messages and voice calling app WhatsApp every day

And if they started charging for use, even 1 cent per message, that number would drop by 99%

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[iampiti]

Now it's completely free (as in money) but you may be aware that the app used to cost 1€ per year. Somehow it managed to build up a huge user base and then Facebook bought it and eliminated the need to pay.
Of course pay-per-message is not the same thing as a yearly payment

Time to monetize

[wh1pp3t]

I use it because of family/friends. But once ads are blasted mid-conversation, I'm out.

The pervasiveness of marketing in mobile amazes me. It obviously works on the greater population though...

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[unixisc]

World's population is 7.5 'American billion' people. Incidentally, what other billion is there?

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[Whibla]

Incidentally, what other billion is there?

The two definitions of billion are:

1) One thousand million (10^9)
2) One million million (10^12)

There's a nice pretty map [wikipedia.org] of which countries use which version, and a bit of history as to when some of them, the UK particularly, changed which definition it uses officially.

While most people now tend to use 10^9 there are a few 'hold-outs' and if it's important it can be worth checking which version they're referring to, just to be sure...

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[cakiwi]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

totally believe

[Andre Dias]

200 million of those are from Brazil

My wife's family uses it

[lgordon]

WhatsApp is really handy, and not as a replacement for texting. You can make phone calls anywhere with good quality, sure, but everything does that. Where whatsapp excels is in groups, where all the messages go to everyone in the groups, and most people are in multiple groups. So my wife has a group with her siblings, and one with her family, and one with her cousins, so you wind up having these continuous threads of conversations, which include texts, voice memos, pictures, links, etc. More like a slack

Thanks so much for WhatsApp!

[ffkom]

I'm so glad I can honestly tell that billion people I do not want to communicate with: "Sorry, but I am not on Facebook, and certainly not using their messenger".

Facebook should really separate completely from the open Internet and keep its users in a walled, electro-fenced garden. The Internet is just a better place with Facebook users staying amongst their kind.

I thought it was just for Tinder contacts

[Kellamity]

I don't have any friends that use it, I have only heard that if you meet people on Tinder and you don't want to give them your real number yet (or keep chatting in the shit Tinder interface) you get them to ad you on WhatsApp. I didn't realise there were people who used it as an way to contact their actual friends instead of SMS.

Where are they?

[Trogre]

Where are all these people? The ones I know use Viber or plain SMS for IM.