How does WhatsApp earn?

WhatsApp has been the all time favorite messaging app in the world. The store is full of various messaging apps however the single thing which makes it different than the most of the apps is that it never shows (irritating) ads.

Have you ever wondered how does whatsapp earns without showing ads?

Is WhatsApp free everywhere?

In most of the developed countries, WhatsApp has been charging an annual subscription fee of around $1. This has continued till 2016. Recently, it has been removed  and the company exploring other ways to earn money.

Why free in India?

It has been always free in India. The users only have to bear the cost of the data it consumes. The reason being that not many consumers had access to credit/debit cards initially hence lack of access to the payment medium was an issue for the company and there were several free competitors in the market like WeChat, Line etc. So to maintain an edge over them they never thought to charge Indian consumers directly.

How does/will it earn?

Unlike its competitors, it has managed to stay away from third party ads since it was founded. Wonder how does it earn and would earn in the future?

The most straight forward way was by charging annual subscription fee. Seeing at the huge no. of consumers this was a considerable amount.

In the era of targeted marketing and since facebook now has information of 1 billion plus whatsapp users, it could be possible in near future that this info is used for targeted ads for the consumers thus earning indirectly.

It has brought more interesting features and is involved in attracting more users and planning it to ultimately making it a platform of interaction between customers and businesses, mainly for service and product support purpose and charging the businesses for it. This was revealed by its CEO Jan Koum.

Interesting facts about WhatsApp

 

The WhatsApp has had an interesting journey, lets see some facts-

It was incorporated in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former employees of Yahoo!.

In early days of development, WhatsApp kept crashing or getting stuck and at a particular point, Jan Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon which Brian Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months".

After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone.

WhatsApp was switched from a free to paid service to avoid growing too fast, mainly because the primary cost was sending verification texts to users!

By February 2013, WhatsApp's user base had swollen to about 200 million active users and its staff to 50.

In 2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide, India has the largest number of consumers.

Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date. At the time, the acquisition was the largest purchase of a venture-backed company in history.

As of February 2016, WhatsApp has over 1 billion users globally.

 

On January 18, 2016, WhatsApp's founder Jan Koum announced that the service would no longer charge their users a $1 annual subscription fee in an effort to remove a barrier faced by some users who do not have a credit card to pay for the service. He also explained that the app would not display any third party advertisement and instead would bring new features such as the ability to communicate with business organizations.

So, these were some facts about one ofthe most loved app of our times, the WhatsApp.

Comments/Views welcome in the section below!

Image source: Google images