One-Seventh Of The Global Population Now Uses WhatsApp

Only a few companies in the world can claim more than 1 billion active users and as of last night, WhatsApp was one of them.

Founder Jan Koum and Facbeook CEO Mark Zuckerberg both announced on Facebook that the 7-year-old messaging service had gone past the 1 billion user mark. Facebook itself also has roughly 1.6 billion monthly active users, though its other messaging product Facebook Messenger has about 800 million users.

WhatsApp has for several years been the world’s largest messaging app by active users, and its growth rate doesn’t seem to have slowed down. Messenger is in second place while China’s WeChat, with 650 million active users, comes in third.

Koum shared a graphic showing WhatsApp’s latest stats. One of the most eye opening is that the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has just 57 engineers. When Facebook bought WhatsApp in February 2014 for $19 billion the company had about 50 employees but the company has kept its hiring at a conservative pace since then.

2016 could be the most important year for WhatsApp since it’s acquisition by Facebook. Zuckerberg has given the company free reign since 2014 to focus on growing its user base, and now that it’s reached the 1 billion milestone, it has dropped its subscription fee and will begin putting its strategy in place to make money from businesses.

Last month the company announced it would begin to “test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from.”

Plenty of businesses and groups already use WhatsApp to communicate with their customers, but businesses need deeper access to the company’s network if they want to deal with more complex customers service enquiries, or even transactions.

“WhatsApp's community has more than doubled since joining Facebook,” Zuckerberg said on his official profile page. “We've added the ability for you to call loved ones far away. We've dropped the subscription fee and made WhatsApp completely free. Next , we're going to work to connect more people around the world and make it easier to communicate with businesses.”

WhatsApp has staunchly gone against the trend for most of the world’s other big messaging services to turn themselves into broad platforms for other services, with Japan’s LINE, Korea’s KakaoTalk and China’s WeChat selling access to things like stickers and games. WeChat also has around 10 million “official accounts” used by companies and organizations to talk to people or carry out transactions.

WhatsApp may go down something like the official-accounts route, but given how purely it has stuck to remaining little more than a clean texting and calling app, it’ll probably do so very cautiously.