New York.- WhatsApp celebrated its 15th anniversary on Saturday as the most popular messaging app in the world of communication.
The app offers free and encrypted services to two billion users, but its profitability is complicated.
On Feb.24, 2009, two former Yahoo employees, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, created the instant messaging application.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta acquired the application for approximately $19 billion in 2014.
According to the latest Social Networks Study by IAB Spain (2023), WhatsApp remains the most appreciated application of its kind, used frequently, multiple times a day, and with greater intensity.
WhatsApp’s two billion users worldwide overshadow rivals like the Chinese WeChat (1.336 billion), Facebook Messenger (979 million), or Telegram (800 million), according to the website Statista.
The application has been adding more advanced features over time: from video calls and voice notes, now considered basic features, to creating groups and even leaving them without notifying other members. The latest innovation allows users to edit already sent messages.
Artificial intelligence has already made its way into novelties, allowing users to generate stickers, and images, and chat with an assistant within certain limits.
“AIs can read what is sent to them, but your personal messages remain end-to-end encrypted, so no one else, including Meta, can see them,» the company assures on its website.
Since 2018, WhatsApp Business has been offering a platform for corporate communication, with about 200 million users willing to pay for each customer conversation. This seems to be a profitable solution.
It is not clear how much business WhatsApp contributes to Meta’s overall volume, but some analysts estimate it to be around one percent.
Meta prefers to refer to its «family of apps,» which includes Instagram and Facebook. The apps have a large advertising business, generating a combined revenue of $133 billion in 2023.
According to the media, the potential monetization of the application was one of the reasons why its founders left Meta a few years after Zuckerberg’s acquisition, as they criticized the fact that people did not want to see ads while talking to their friends and family.
The Insider Intelligence data collected by CNBC shows that WhatsApp has the highest number of users in Spain, Italy, and Argentina. However, other sources point to countries such as Brazil and India.
However, traditional phone text messaging (SMS) still prevails in the United States.
