WhatsApp Status Users Population Grows Much to Detriment of Snapchat

WhatsApp Messenger has hit the milestone of having 1 billion daily users around the globe with 250 million of this population using the WhatsApp Status, a Snapchat like feature, that was updated six months ago.

With this development, it appears Facebook is winning the war with Snapchat Stories more than before. According to a TechCrunch report,“Facebook is winning the race to bring Snapchat’s Stories format to the rest of the world before its originator. WhatsApp Status, its version of Snapchat Stories, now has 250 million daily active users. That’s despite it being relegated to a secondary dedicated tab in the app, opposed to being front and centre on the home screen like Instagram Stories which also now has over 250 million users”. The obvious weapon appears to be WhatsApp users population and spread.

Compared to WhatsApp, Snapchat has about 166 million daily users, this number includes the number of users of the Snapchat messaging feature. On the other hand, WhatsApp with its accumulating features of text messaging, Status Update and the video plus audio calls, makes 76% of the 1 billion users to come back daily. About 55 billion messages, including 4.5 Billion photos and 1 billion videos, are sent daily by WhatsApp users.

Also, Snapchat might have made a huge mistake by focusing on just the US market instead of the global market, as its format seems to have been used by WhatsApp to gain more users.

WhatsApp was founded in 2009, and was acquired by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in 2014 for a total sum of $19 billion, but was allowed to run its own management with Jan Koum as the CEO. In just the space of a year and six months, the app has grown its users from 1 billion monthly to 1 billion daily, making the seemingly exorbitant purchase price appear worth it.

WhatsApp has shown a steady growth in users and according to Zuckerberg, would soon have its WhatsApp Status feature enabling video ads like those of Instagram. The metric updates were announced by Mark on his Facebook profile and by Jan Koum in his blog post of stats.

Koum renewed WhatsApp’s commitment to delivering the reliability, simplicity, and security users expect with WhatsApp.