While Snapchat may be dominating against WhatsApp among teens overall, there’s still quite a large market for WhatsApp Messenger in areas outside North America.
That’s according to GlobalWebIndex, whose latest figures shed a little light on the logic behind Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition earlier this year. Globally, WhatsApp has risen just 8 percent from the beginning of 2013 to now among mobile internet users.
Regionally, though, is where you really start to see the numbers tell a different story. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), for instance, usage is as high as 68 percent, while usage in Latin America is as high as 61 percent. Malaysia stands at a very high 77 percent. This contrasts sharply to North America, where usage is only 7 percent. North America is also one of Snapchat‘s hotspots and one of the places where WhatsApp usage has actually gone down.
It gets even lower in Asian countries — China (4%), South Korea (2%) and Japan (0%) –- partly due to the respective popularity of WeChat, KakaoTalk and LINE.
WhatsApp users still haven’t abandoned social networks such as Facebook, which stll claims 81 percent of WhatsApp users as its own. WhatsApp users can also be found on YouTube (72%) and Google+ (51%), which shows that social networks are still the preferred method of contact and content consumption among many users on WhatsApp.