Why it matters to you
The more users on WhatsApp, the more development that will go into building cool features for the messaging service.
WhatsApp is beating Snapchat at its own game. The company announced that it has hit a milestone of 1 billion daily active users — but perhaps more interesting it the fact that Status — the company’s Snapchat Stories competitor — now has 250 million daily active users.
By comparison, Snapchat only has 166 million daily users for its entire app, not just the Snapchat Stories feature. And, many of the people who have Snapchat likely don’t even use Stories in the first place.
The 1 billion daily users is a big milestone. Not only that, but the app has also hit 1.3 billion monthly active users — which means that 76 percent of its user base uses the app every day. Also announced was the fact that users now send 55 billion messages per day, including 4.5 billion photos and 1 billion videos.
The growth has been quick for WhatsApp, which hit 1 billion monthly active users in February 2016. When Facebook acquired the company in 2014, the service had 350 million daily users.
So what do all those users mean? According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company is “still early on the monetization side” for the app and both Facebook and WhatsApp are building teams to address how the app can eventually make money. Monetizing an app that has 1 billion daily active uses could result in huge profits.
Zuckerberg also announced metrics for Instagram Stories, which also has 250 million daily active users — meaning that both WhatsApp and Instagram are beating Snapchat at the Stories game. For WhatsApp, the 250 million daily active users of WhatsApp Stories is up from 175 million users three months ago.
A report from TechCrunch notes that the huge growth of Status since it first launched shows that Snapchat missed the mark in focusing solely on U.S. users rather than branching out across the globe.
It will be interesting to see how WhatsApp continues to grow in the near future and if Snapchat can make moves to compete against WhatsApp and Instagram.