Messaging app WhatsApp has reached 430 million monthly active users, according to the company’s CEO at the DLD conference in Munich. This is a pretty sizable jump from the 400 million users quoted back in December. 18 billion messages received and 36 billion messages sent are processed by the application each day.
WhatsApp will remain committed to and focused on “pure and simple messaging”
Koum dismissed the possibility of WhatsApp becoming a full social platform similar to LINE or KakaoTalk, saying that the company wants to “focus on messaging — to us there is a lot of coolness in having a pure and simple messaging and if people want to play games there are plenty of other sites and applications they can go to and play games.” Koum said WhatsApp would remain “focused on messaging” as well, and wasn’t interested in putting the focus on WhatsApp on other things like “advertising” or “gaming” or “disappearing photo[s]”.
Regarding advertising, the CEO said that “putting advertising in the way of people trying to communicate and wanting to send direct messages to each other would be just so wrong in our mind.”
That doesn’t mean the company isn’t looking to monetize the app in some way outside of the low fee its charges on some platforms. In fact, while the company is focused right now on building a reliable messaging service, Koum says that monetization is “something that we’ll look at in 2016, or 2018 or 2020 – it’s far, far down the road”.
WhatsApp is looking to stay independent rather than selling out to other companies
Of course, WhatsApp also isn’t interested in selling out, despite interest from some companies like Facebook and Google. Reiterating statements made last year, Koum said the company is looking to stay independent.
430 million users is certainly a pretty big milestone, with 30 million active users in a month. Comparing that to even the number of “registered” users quoted by other apps that generally help to increase their overall user count for the press, WhatsApp is arguably the king of messaging, with Skype continuing to conquer the VoIP side of the aisle.
WhatsApp is available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8 and is also available for BlackBerry 10, making it one of the few major messaging services to release its app on the platform.