NEW YORK – Chat platform WhatsApp celebrates its 15th anniversary this Saturday, as it has become the most popular communication tool in the world, with more than 2,000 million users benefiting from its free and encrypted service, which in particular further complicates its profitability.
The instant messaging app 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 known as Meta, when it was acquired by its founder Mark Zuckerberg for about $19,000 million.
According to the latest social networking study conducted by IAB Spain (2023), WhatsApp remains the most valuable application of its kind, the one that is used most frequently – several times a day – and most intensely, and most casually, since then it is a favorite among millennials. And zeta and alpha.
WhatsApp's 2,000 million users worldwide make messaging rivals like China's WeChat (1,336 million), Facebook Messenger (979 million) and Telegram (800 million) pale in comparison, according to Statista.
The “app” includes increasingly complex innovations: from video calls or voice notes, which are now essential, to the possibility of creating groups and now also leaving them without the knowledge of all members. Its latest innovation is to allow you to edit already sent messages.
As expected, artificial intelligence (AI) has already made its way into the news, although due to its particular nature it is anecdotal: users can use the technology to create icons, images, and chat with an assistant within “boundaries.”
“AI systems can read what is sent to them, but your personal messages are still end-to-end encrypted, so no one, including meta, can see them,” the company says on its website, though it expects it will make this Technology is available. .of developers and companies one of its veins.
Since 2018, the “app” has been providing the WhatsApp Business platform for corporate communication, with about 200 million users willing to pay cents for every conversation with their customers, which seems to be a solution to the problem of profitability.
Meta does not detail the size of WhatsApp's business, which some analysts estimate at around 1% of the total, and prefers to point to its “family of apps”, which includes Instagram and Facebook, with a large advertising business, which in 2023 had a combined turnover of 133,000 million.
According to specialized media, the potential monetization of the application was one of the reasons that prompted its founders to leave Meta a few years after Zuckerberg's purchase, as they criticized people's unwillingness to see ads while talking to their friends and family.
According to data from Insider Intelligence compiled by CNBC, the highest WhatsApp penetration in the country occurs in Spain, Italy and Argentina, although other pages point to countries like Brazil and India. The area that has not spread completely is in the United States, where classic phone text messaging (SMS) prevails.
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