WhatsApp passes 1 billion monthly active users

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WhatsApp has joined a growing club of services that can now count having more than 1 billion monthly active users. Jan Koum, the head of the Facebook-owned company, posted on the popular social network of the achievement. It comes just nearly five months after it was revealed that WhatsApp had 900 million monthly active users.

To mark this occasion, Koum also shared that the service has seen 42 billion messages sent through it daily, 1.6 billion photos shared, 1 billion groups organized through it, and 250 million videos shared.

By hitting this milestone, WhatsApp joins what appears to be a growing number of apps that Facebook owns with such an enormous reach. The company's core app is already being used by more than 1.5 billion people monthly and it's likely that Facebook Messenger will soon be joining the two other services — will Instagram and maybe Oculus be that far behind?

WhatsApp really hit it big time when Facebook purchased the messaging app in 2014 for more than $16 billion. At the time, it only had 450 million monthly active users, but under the leadership of Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, that number has more than doubled in the past two years.

Today's announcement comes days after Facebook announced its Q4 FY2015 earnings, as well as dropping its $1 annual subscription fee. In the latter, WhatsApp decided to monetize its service by charging businesses instead. Koum described the $1 fee as being something that "really doesn't work for some people." The company doesn't have a firm plan yet on how to monetize the service, but it will likely be around customer support which is very similar to what Facebook has planned for its Messenger service.

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WhatsApp passes 1 billion monthly active users

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