Instagram threatened Facebook’s role as the best place to share photos, and Facebook scooped it up. The most likely answer is, Facebook is terrified of losing its position as the world’s primary social network and messaging platform. Why did Facebook pay $19 billion for WhatsApp?ĭepending on how cynical you are, there are a few answers to this question. (The back-end - which is probably one of the busiest databases in the world - is programmed in Erlang, incidentally.) WhatsApp is a classic example of identifying a gap in the market, and then producing a very simple app that perfectly fulfils that need. The company has never spent a penny on marketing. The entire service is developed and maintained by less than 50 employees. In terms of monetization, WhatsApp is free for the first year, and then $1 per year after that. Upwards of 50 billion text messages are sent and received by WhatsApp every 24 hours (more than doubling Facebook’s usage), along with hundreds of millions of photos and video messages. The growth rate of WhatsApp has been utterly insane: In November 2013 it had 190 million monthly active users today, it has 450 million active users and 320 million daily active users, with 1 million new users joining every day. It is incredibly popular in the rest of the world, though - most notably in Europe, but also in the all-important developing economies of Africa and Asia. Why haven’t you heard of WhatsApp? Because, for whatever reason, it hasn’t yet become popular in the US.
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