WhatsApp – the near-ubiquitous messaging app – celebrates its eighth birthday today, February 24, and it's marking the occasion by rolling out its revamped Status feature to users worldwide. Owned by Facebook since 2014, WhatsApp has become a global phenomenon, connecting people across regions and demographics, and is especially popular in emerging markets such as India and Brazil. On the eighth anniversary of WhatsApp’s launch, here’s a look at eight stats about the app that will probably surprise you.
WhatsApp has a staggering 1.2 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp Product Manager Randall Sarafa told Gadgets 360 last week. The messaging app in February 2016 announced that over one billion people use its app, and the number has increased 20 percent since. It is among the few community-driven apps to have over a billion users, the others being Facebook, YouTube, and Facebook Messenger.
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WhatsApp users send well over 50 billion messages per day, the company says. On New Year’s Eve, as many as 14 billion messages were sent in India only; this figure included 3.1 billion images, 700 million GIFs, and 610 million videos. 8 billion messages were sent on the day of Diwali.
WhatsApp started allowing users to send GIFs as messages in November 2016, and within three months, over 80 million GIFs are shared on an average day, according to the company - though as we pointed out above, on special occasions such as New Year's Eve, the number gets a lot higher.
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WhatsApp users across the world send as many as 3.3 billion photos on the platform on an average day, a number that is said to have doubled over the past year.
The number of videos shared on WhatsApp has seen even faster growth, tripling to 760 million videos sent per day.
WhatsApp has over 200 million users in India, the company's co-founder Jan Koum said in a tweet in February 2017. The app's India user base was 160 million in November 2016, meaning that it gained 40 million users in roughly 4 months.
Over 100 million voice calls are made on WhatsApp every single day, allowing people to connect with each other without incurring huge costs.
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WhatsApp users send over 200 million voice messages per day, a staggering number by all accounts.
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