Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the leading chat apps in the world at the moment.
The two have a combined user base of close to 2 billion, but of course, it is possible to find one person with both apps installed on their devices. While WhatsApp boasts a massive following of over 1 billion, there is close to 900 million that are currently using Facebook Messenger. The surprising fact about these figures is that they represent the apps’ monthly active activity.
With this in mind, Facebook has revealed that these two apps process up to 60 billion messages in a single day when combined. This information was revealed during the recently-concluded F8 developer conference. These are huge figures and given that WhatsApp had previously announced that it sees through more than 30 billion messages a day, it is possible that this figure has increased, which also means that the chat app accounts for a larger part of the said traffic. Back then, WhatsApp had hardly reached 800 million monthly active users. Now that it has added another 200+ million monthly active users to its name, more messages are being exchanged through this platform than earlier reported.
When compared to the 20 billion SMS chats that are exchanged on each day, it is obvious that the IM industry is huge and it will be getting even bigger. A little over a year ago, WhatsApp had 700 million monthly active users. The application has added another 300 million users to its name, now boasting 1+ billion users – only Facebook surpasses this figure in terms of user base. On the other hand, Facebook has added a little over 200 million users over the same one year period (from last year’s F8 developer conference).
With these figures in mind, it is expected that these two apps’ combined message traffic should be well over 60 billion messages per day. Maybe it’s time we got a better explanation of what “monthly active users” really means.