This should be making massive profits for Facebook. Remember when Mark was eager to have Whats App run ads? Now, the Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp said on Wednesday it has amassed 2 billion users, becoming the second social media platform in the world to hit that milestone.
Facebook bought WhatsApp it had 500 million users in 2014. 6 years down the line and now, even though they did not specify how they calculated the numbers, Facebook Inc said it has now crossed the 2 Billion active users mark. Facebook bought the mobile-messaging startup for $19 billion to boost its popularity, especially among a younger crowd.
Facebook has been trying to boost revenue from its high-growth units such as photo-sharing platform Instagram and WhatsApp. It has been building out WhatsApp’s e-commerce tools, as it moves toward monetizing the app.
WhatsApp in November launched a feature for small businesses, the main users for WhatsApp Business app, that offered them a “mobile storefront” to showcase their wares with images and prices. Facebook had about 2.50 billion monthly active users as of Dec. 31.
The biggest threat to WhatsApp and Instagram is the Chinese-owned Tik Tok. TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming. It is used to create short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos.
The app was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android for markets outside of China. ByteDance had previously launched Douyin (Chinese: 抖音) for the Chinese market in September 2016. TikTok and Douyin are similar to each other but run on separate servers to comply with Chinese censorship restrictions.
The application allows users to create short music and lip-sync videos of 3 to 15 seconds and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. It is popular in Asia, the United States, and other parts of the world. TikTok is not available in China, and its servers are based in countries where the app is available.
TikTok was the most downloaded app in the US in October 2018, the first Chinese app to achieve this.[9][10] As of 2018, it is available in over 150 markets and in 75 languages. In February 2019, TikTok, together with Douyin, hit one billion downloads globally, excluding Android installs in China.[11] In 2019, TikTok was announced to be the 7th most downloaded mobile app of the decade, from 2010 to 2019. In the three years after it launched on September 2016, TikTok had 500 million active users.
