Facebook has two messaging platforms – Messenger and WhatsApp. While imagine many people would have accounts with both services, figures released in parallel with Facebook’s quarterly earnings report revealed that WhatsApp boasts over a billion users each day. Messenger has over a billion monthly users.
It’s only taken a few months for WhatsApp to move from a billion users a month to a billion users per day according to a recent blog post. Those users are sending about 55 billion messages each day which, at least based on some data, is more than twice as many messages sent by SMS and three times as many as Apple handles with iMessage.
SMS is a significant cash-cow for telcos but it seems the popularity of that tool is slowly being usurped.
Facebook’s $22B purchase of WhatsApp a few years ago, and the strength of Messenger means they are the big player when it comes to online messaging. I’m finding I receive very few text messages these days with iMessage, WhatsApp and Messenger dominating my alerts. When I travel, especially across Asia, WhatsApp is the default option for staying in touch with work colleagues.
What about you? What messaging platform do you mainly use?
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2 responses to “Facebook Owns Online Messaging”
Where are you from Anthony Caruana? Interested to see if location changes this as I imagine it does. I use WhatApp only to communicate with one small group of people and would rather use something else. I use Messenger for family and a couple of others but I use SMS for lots and lots of things…. I have unlimited SMS on my plan, as does my whole family.
I’m in Australia but travel a lot and deal with people all over the world. Most of my family are iOS users so there’s a lot of iMessage chatter. But Messenger is really big with friends and WhatsApp is becoming the default for work. But those three groups overlap quite a bit for me.
I use Viber for something that is simple to use and less “social network” like.
When I’m in Korea – Kakao Talk is the absolute dominant messaging app.