A few days ago Facebook presented its financial results for the past year and during that event it released interesting figures about its entire business, which today we could describe as absolutely gigantic. One of the services that stands out above almost all is that of WhatsApp, the most used instant messaging application worldwide.
To understand the WhatsApp phenomenon, which is certainly complicated, it is best to do it through 10 figures that will allow you to discover the monstrosity (in a good way) that this instant messaging application has become and that for some time now has also allowed us to make video calls.
XNUMX billion active users
Since WhatsApp come into our lives has grown over time in an impressive way, until reaching the 1.000 million active users that it has to date according to official figures released by those responsible for the service.
There are several applications that have reached that figure in terms of downloads, which differs very much from having 1.000 million active users, that is, they use it practically daily.
It has a value of $ 21.800 billion
This figure is what Facebook paid to take ownership of WhatsApp on February 19, 2014. Before, they had received numerous offers from many other large companies, including that of Google that came to put 10.000 billion dollars on the table, which was not enough to have in their possession the instant messaging application with the largest number of users in the world.
The purchase of WhatsApp by Facebook was undoubtedly a great coup, since not only was it done with a very important application, but it also left many others like Google without one of their greatest wishes.
Facebook + WhatsApp = exponential growth
Since Facebook acquired WhatsApp, we have not yet seen all the changes that many of us feared, among which of course was a possible integration of the instant messaging service in the social network. What we have seen has been incredible growth.
And it is that since Mark Zuckerberg closed the purchase of the popular service it has not stopped growing. In February 2014, WhstApp had 450 million active users, two years later these have doubled and already reach 1.000 million as we have previously told.
We all have at least one group
That at least is what the data says and that is that according to the data provided by WhatsApp there are a total of 1.000 billion groups, that is, one for each active user. Of course, someone has to live very quietly without any group because I have at least a dozen of them.
Every day 42.000 million messages are sent
With 1.000 billion active users, anyone could suspect that the number of messages sent every day is absolutely enormous. Well, I think it's so huge that you can't even imagine it. Once again, According to the official figures provided by WhatsApp, a total of 42.000 million messages are sent every day.
This amount of messages quantified in space represents 39 TB of text, something that we could not save on almost any computer that we all have at home, or do you have a super hard drive of more than 39 TB?
Each user sends 1,6 photos every day
If 42.000 million messages are sent every day through WhatsApp, without any data on the messages that each user sends on average, we do know the number of photographs that are sent. And is that each user sends 1,6 images on average every day.
If you multiply it by the 1.000 million active users that the service has, the photo album that we could have would surely help us to jump from photo to photo around the world.
More than 250 million videos are sent every day
If 42.000 million messages and 1,6 images on average are sent every day, the number of videos sent through WhatsApp is not far behind and is that in total 250 million videos are sent.
WhatsApp is available in 53 languages
WhatsApp is available in a total of countries. The country with the largest number of active users is India, where it has close to 10% of the market share. If we look at that market share South Africa, with 78% is the one with the highest penetration. It is followed by Singapore, with 72%, Hong Kong, with 71%, and Spain, with 70%, according to data from the consulting firm PWC.
There are 57 engineers in the WhatsApp template
Surely this figure will surprise you and although it may seem like a joke Only 57 engineers work in WhatsApp, although the workforce is much larger And it is that not only a few engineers are capable of carrying out a service like this.
If we divide the number of engineers by the number of active users, each engineer should monitor or control a total of 17.543.859.6491 users.
WhatsApp is currently worth $ 386.000 billion
As we have already said in the article, in 2014 Facebook bought WhatsApp, which was by then the most popular instant messaging application with the most users in the world. However, with the passage of time, it has grown in an impressive way, until generating a service that today has 1.000 million active users. Of course the value of WhatsApp has been growing and according to Forbes magazine today it has a value of 386.000 million dollars.
That amount is just a reference since I don't think the social network owned by Mark Zuckerberg can sell it for that disproportionate amount of money.
Undoubtedly, WhatsApp is today a monster of enormous dimensions, which has an incalculable value and which continues to grow in terms of the number of users day by day. The question is, to what extent and for how long? But at the moment we do not know, nor can we even imagine.