WhatsApp has crossed another milestone number, with founder Jan Koum announcing that the messaging service now has more than 700 million active monthly users.
That’s 250 million more users than WhatsApp had in February 2014, when Facebook announced plans to buy it for $19 billion. (The deal closed in October, with Koum taking a Facebook board seat and continuing to run WhatsApp.)
For comparison, Twitter has 284 million active monthly users, and it’s currently worth around $23 billion. So in less than a year, WhatsApp has added nearly as many users as Twitter has altogether.
Snapchat, another messaging service, is more close-mouthed about its user numbers. An August Wall Street Journal report put the number at more than 100 million. That would indicate rapid growth if this Business Insider report, from December 2013, correctly estimated the number of monthly active users at 30 million—but still puts it far behind WhatsApp.
Emails leaked by Sony hackers in November revealed that Facebook had offered more than $3 billion to buy Snapchat, confirming the social network’s strong interest in the fast-growing field of messaging apps.
Photo by Tsahi Levent-Levi
