WhatsApp has more than 250 million active users, reveals CEO

WhatsApp's popularity as a messaging service has not been one to question. However, the company has stayed away from revealing any numbers in terms of its user base. A report by WSJ change that, stating that the company's CEO revealed a user base of 250 million active users.

In April, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum had made a statement at the All Things D Mobile Conference saying Twitter was bigger than WhatsApp, which was seen as a pointer to the user base. In March 2013, Twitter had earlier announced it has more than 200 million active users sending over 400 million tweets every day. It was hence apparent that the service's user base was more than 200 million.

WhatsApp had recently made a record of processing 27 billion messages in a single day. The break-up was of 10 billion inbound sent messages and 17 billion outbound received messages.

Though there are a lot of competing services, none of them have tapped a market bigger than WhatsApp. There has been a surge of services such as WeChat and Hike recently along with previously existing applications such as Nimbuzz. Another point to bring into notice is the fact that now BlackBerry's popular messaging service BBM will soon be going cross-platform. With the BlackBerry Messenger soon available on Android and iOS devices along with the company's own phones, WhatsApp's might finally have a serious cross-platform competitor.

There are also long term popular applications such as Facebook and Skype that tap a huge user base in the market. Microsoft last year had revealed that Skype had a user base of 280 million users. Thus, despite being just four years old, WhatsApp is surely keeping up with 'experienced' competition.

One place where WhatsApp has an edge over other competitors is also that of its cross platform availability on mobile platforms, at a reasonable cost. While it costs 99 cents on the iPhone, on Android it comes as a free application with a subscription fee of 99 cents starting the 2nd year of use. The application is also available of Symbian and Windows Phone platforms free of cost.