WhatsApp now has 500 million active users, growth mostly in emerging markets

Popular IM WhatsApp announced via a blog post that they now have half a billion active users throughout the world. Apart from the impressive user stats, the 5 line blog post also highlighted a high rate of multimedia sharing throughout the platform.

Thanks to all of you, half a billion people around the world are now regular, active WhatsApp users. In the last few months, we’ve grown fastest in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia, and our users are also sharing more than 700 million photos and 100 million videos every single day. We could go on, but for now, it’s more important that we get back to work – because here at WhatsApp, we’re just getting started.

At the time of Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp, the 5 year old IM was said to have 450 million users and registering 1 million new users daily. It seems this growth trend hasn’t slowed down as WhatsApp has added 50 million more users since the Facebook purchase in February 2014.

Well on course to 1 billion users

500,000,000 active users is significant for WhatsApp because it’s halfway towards that 1 billion milestone that Facebook CE Mark Zuckerberg referred to when he announced the WhatApp purchase. WhatsApp’s focus is still on growth and they are doing a helluva job at it.

Competition. Only one to take note of.

Line from Japan seems, or at least claims to be the closest to WhatsApp with 400 million users. But there is always a question mark with Line because they never breakdown the figures to active users to give a clear indication of how big it really is. Interesting is that this new milestone from WhatsApp makes it bigger than Viber (200 million users) and Facebook Messenger (200 million users) combined.

So far with 355 million active users, WeChat seems the only competitor worth note. If their aggressive marketing campaigns in South Africa are anything to go by, then just like WhatsApp, WeChat is looking at emerging markets for further growth and growth is indeed happening.

Since Q3 2013, WeChat has grown by 36% from 270 million active users to the current 355 million. It’s not 1 million a day but it’s definitely competition to take note of.