The WhatsApp chat platform turns 15 this Saturday, consolidated as the most popular communication tool in the world, with more than 2,000 million users who take advantage of its free and encrypted service, something that precisely complicates its profitability.
The instant messaging application was created on February 24, 2009 by two former Yahoo employees, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, and in 2014 it became part of what is now Meta, when It was acquired by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for about $19 billion.
According to the latest IAB Spain Social Networks Study (2023), WhatsApp continues to reign as the most valued application of its kind, the one that is used most frequently -several times a day- and with greater intensity, and the most transversal, since It is the favorite of the millennial, zeta and alpha generations.
The 2,000 million WhatsApp users around the world make messaging rivals such as the Chinese WeChat (1,336 million), Facebook Messenger (979 million) and Telegram (800 million) pale in comparison, according to the Statista website.
The ‘app’ has been incorporating increasingly complex innovations: from video calls or voice notes, now basic, to the possibility of creating groups and now also of leaving them without all members finding out. Its most recent innovation is to allow you to edit messages already sent.
As expected, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already made its way into the news, although due to their private nature they are anecdotal: users can use the technology to generate emoticons, images and chat with an assistant within “limits”.
“AIs can read what is sent to them, but your personal messages are still encrypted from start to finish so no one, including Meta, can see them,” the company says on its website, although it anticipates that it will make the technology available. of developers and companies, one of its veins.
And since 2018, the ‘app’ has offered the WhatsApp Business platform for corporate communication, with some 200 million users willing to pay cents for each conversation with their clients and which seems to be a solution to the problem of profitability.
Minority income within the ‘Target family’
Meta does not break down WhatsApp’s business volume, which some analysts place at around 1% of the total, and prefers to refer to its “family of ‘apps'”, which includes Instagram and Facebook, with a large advertising business, and which In 2023 they had a joint turnover of 133,000 million.
According to specialized media, the potential monetization of the application was one of the reasons why its founders left Meta a few years after Zuckerberg’s purchase, since they criticized that people did not want to see ads while talking to their friends and family. .
According to data from Insider Intelligence collected by CNBC, WhatsApp’s highest country penetration occurs in Spain, Italy and Argentina, although other pages point to countries such as Brazil and India. Where it has not quite caught on is in the US, where the classic telephone text message (SMS) prevails. EFE
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