 "We're bigger than Twitter: WhatsApp CEO")
Look who’s trying to upstage Twitter. Surprise, surprise, it’s WhatsApp! The CEO of the cross-platform messaging app service has boasted that WhatsApp has a bigger user base than Twitter.
On stage at the D: Dive Into Mobile, WhatsApp’s CEO Jan Koum said that the messaging service had more monthly active users than Twitter. While he did not reveal the exact number, but he confirmed they are far more than Twitter’s figure. This means the figure is somewhere north of 200 million.
Koum said that WhatsApp processes eight billion inbound messages and 12 billion outbound missives daily, making it one of the most successful cross platform messaging app. The app has a great impact on messaging, with millions of smartphone users all over the world using WhatsApp to communicate with each other.
Bigger than Twitter?
WhatsApp has been in the news recently for being a lucrative acquisition. According to reports, rumours have been rife about Google aspiring to acquire WhatsApp for a figure of $1 billion for the longest time now.
t’s been rumoured for quite some time now that a mobile messaging service would be the next big buy in the mobile space. It was rumoured in December last year that Facebook was in talks to acquire WhatsApp. However, multiple sources soon refuted the talk. WhatsApp also said that the article was a rumour and not factually accurate.
At the conference, Kuom denied the rumours vehemently again. WhatsApp has slowly been slowly trying to introduce the $0.99 subscription based model. Surprisingly, it has not affected a drop-off in the service. Monetisation is not an issue currently.
“We’re looking forward to a world with billions of phones,” Koum said. “And once that happens it’s going to be extremely easy to monetize. But a lot more people need to join the smartphone revolution and a lot more people need to buy more goods on their phones.”
There is definitely no scope for advertising within WhatsApp, says Koum. “We do have a manifesto opposing advertising,” he said. “We’re proud of that. Who likes advertising? We’re so bombarded with ads so much in our daily lives and we felt that smartphones aren’t the place for that. Our phones are so intimately connected to us, to our lives. Putting advertising on a device like that is a bad idea. You don’t want to be interrupted by ads when you’re chatting with your loved ones…Our monetization strategy is simple. One dollar a year. If we did something besides that, it would just get in the way. … We want a great product and great user experience.”
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