So the appeal of free texts and calls doesn’t resonate with Americans.īut that’s not to say it isn’t catching on. Most carriers have offered free messaging and voice calling bundles for years now.

Data charges are crazy high, which is why WhatsApp can come in and instantly be successful.

In markets like Europe and Asia, that’s a huge value proposition. Remember: the core of WhatsApp is free text messages. WhatsApp isn’t meteorically successful in the US quite yet. The good news? This large user base is on the brink of taking over your world. Some countries practically rely on WhatsApp, while others are slower to adopt. Images, text, videos, voice messages.the possibilities are endless.īut you need to know who is on the other end of that app. As a marketer, WhatsApp gives you so many ways to communicate to an audience. The market share for Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp combined accounts for 79% of the entire messaging market. It’s actually starting to overtake Skype for voice call market share.Īnd think about this. Just this month they passed the 100 million voice calls per day mark. Though what the company can and cannot see is hotly debated.And you can even do voice calls with WhatsApp. Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can read your messages, the company says, and information entered into WhatsApp will not be shared onto any other platform owned by Facebook. It was always assumed that Facebook invested for the amount of user data it could capture, though with the end-to-end encryption of messages, this became more complicated. The absence of ads on WhatsApp is due to the fact that Acton and Koum, the app’s founders, left Yahoo! due to work relating to selling ads. It cost users $1/£1 per year, or it was free for the first year and then it cost $1/£1 each subsequent year. In the early days of the app’s existence – if you can remember back to that stone age – WhatsApp was a pay-for app.

He said that respect for the WhatsApp users privacy was in their DNA. WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, who is originally from Ukraine, wrote in a blog about WhatsApp and Facebook’s partnership about his childhood growing up in the USSR in the 80s when they were not able to speak freely on the telephone as their communications were monitored by the KGB.

The acquisition raised some eyebrows at the fact that Facebook now had access to data that was contained in private messages.

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