Up until a few years ago, SMS packs were a big selling point for holidays and major festivals. However, with the internet becoming more affordable and accessible, users have resorted to instant messaging apps like WhatsApp to communicate on a daily basis. A report claims that on the 31st of December 2017, over 75 billion messages were sent on WhatsApp worldwide. For context, Earth’s population is 7.6 billion.
In India alone, WhatsApp has over 200 million monthly active users who sent over 20 billion messages on New Year’s Eve. That is a staggering figure for one country which constitutes more than 1/4th of the total messages sent across the world. Incidentally, the last day of the year also turned out to be WhatsApp’s biggest messaging day ever.
Ever since the internet became cheaper and smartphones became affordable, SMS services have seen a severe decline and active usage. Moreover, instant messaging apps let users send more than just text messages to each other. It allows users to express in a more expansive way through GIFs, videos or emoticons.
Over the course of 2017, WhatsApp released a few new features which a lot of users had asked for including ‘Delete For All’. Ever since Facebook took over WhatsApp, there have been instances where Facebook features were trickled down to WhatsApp as well. One such feature was ‘Status’. In less than a year, WhatsApp Status feature has garnered over 300 million monthly active users across the globe. To put this statistic into context, Snapchat as whole experiences about 166 million daily active users. And WhatsApp status feature was set out to be a ‘Snapchat Stories’ clone. Instagram stories, another Snapchat clone hit the 250 million daily active users as well.
In 2017, WhatsApp also hit 1 billion monthly active users. India is WhatsApp’s largest market with 200 million active users. In fact, back in February WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton visited India in order to gather insights from people on how WhatsApp can contribute to the country in a more prominent way.
