WhatsApp Is Well On Its Way To A Billion Users

redletterdave (2493036) writes "In just two months since Facebook dropped $19 billion to buy WhatsApp, the five-year-old mobile messaging app on Tuesday announced its its active user base has grown to more than half a billion people. This is not the first time that an app has seen a major pop in users after it was acquired by Facebook: When Facebook bought Instagram in April 2012, the service boasted some 30 million users. In one month after the deal, Instagram gained 20 million new users. By July, Instagram grew to 80 million active users. WhatsApp seems to be having a similar growth spurt, gaining roughly 25 million users each month since the Facebook deal was announced."

What??

[DogDude]

This looks like a "messaging" app. It seems like the only point is to get around the few remaining billing plans on the planet that don't have unlimited text messaging. Am I insane thinking that this market niche will only exist for another year, at most? I personally don't know anybody who has to pay for messaging, but I understand that some people in other countries still have to (for now)...

Re:Not really true

[SuperKendall]

I simply don't trust a company that farms out their userbase's private information for monetary gain,

But the point is they have not done that with either of those two companies (at least not any more than those companies were already doing).

Your mistake is in treating all subsets of a company equally based on what one part is doing. If you want to see change, reward what a company does that you like, do not instead curse them forever for the mistake of one part. Otherwise you will never see change because there is no motivation nor visibility to what people want more.

Three problems, at least, with the number of users

[Futurepower(R)]

Exactly. Funny and not funny.

Why do people accept what Facebook says about the number of users? There are problems: 1) No independent verification. 2) Conflict of interest. If Facebook claims more users, Facebook makes more money. 3) Many "users" are people who merely tried something and never came back.

Re:Real users?

[radarskiy]

"what evidence is there"
The $1 per year after the first year of use.

Re:Three problems, at least, with the number of us

[korbulon]

This observation deserves beaucoup points. More and more we live in a world where headlines and press releases are treated as news, accepted prima facie without much vetting or scepticism, a lot of it propagated by websites trying to generate clicks. Slashdot for one is certainly not blameless in this racket. Digging a little behind this story, does it mention how many people have stopped using WhatsApp since the buyout? Fairly mum about that, but pretty sure theyr'e still counting those people too.

Like so much in IT, it's hard to tell what's what and what's not.