London - In a rare moment of self-promotion, the notoriously press-shy WhatsApp has published usage statistics, revealing to the Wall Street Journal that it now attracts more than 250 million active monthly users.
The company also revealed that inbound traffic on the app (messages sent) had doubled every six months up to March and that on June 13 they hit a new daily record of 27 billion messages handled in 24 hours.
These figures combine to make WhatsApp one of the largest messaging platforms globally.
The competitive field of so-called “over the top” (OTT) instant messaging platforms has seen explosive growth over the past couple of years, with a variety of different companies offering near-identical services and vying for dominance.
A study by industry-analysts Informa indicated that by the end of this year OTT messaging traffic would be twice that of traditional SMS, topping out at around 41 billion messages sent every day (compared to 19.5bn SMSes).
Founded in 2009 by two ex- Yahoo employees Brian Acton and Jan Koum, WhatsApp is one of the earliest entrants into the field. It charges a subscription of about R10 a year, using consumers’ mobile data to make calls, send texts and pictures.
For this reason such messaging services pose a large threat to telecoms companies, who have historically used high mark-ups on SMS and MMS messaging prices as a cash cow (estimates of 6 000 percent are common).
However, despite WhatsApp’s popularity, it is by no means the clear leader. Microsoft-owned Skype boasts around 280 million monthly active users and has integrated customers from the now-defunct Messenger service. However, Skype – originally a Voice over IP service – has had a six-year head start.
Other competitors include Viber (currently drawing over 200 million monthly active users) and Line (a Japanese-based OTT service that claims 150 million registered users). Even these healthy figures are dwarfed by the likes of WeChat – an OTT app run by Chinese web giant TenCent – with 195 million monthly active users.
OTT messaging apps also threaten social media sites. Facebook, for example, derives much of its traffic from messaging and launched its own app, Facebook Messenger, in 2011. In November TechCrunch estimated that the app pulled in about only 57 million monthly active users.
However, despite impressive statistics, OTT messaging will not be pushing out SMS services anytime soon. Informa analyst Pamela Clark-Dickinson even predicts that SMS revenue will continue to increase through to 2016, partly because the insularity of OTT messaging communities means that “users typically use SMS when communicating with non-OTT users” but also because “SMS is starting to hit its stride in the enterprise mobile messaging market”. – The Independent