People can talk to each other using WhatsApp. They can send text, audio, or video messages to each other. WhatsApp makes money by charging for its Business API and by charging a transaction fee for its WhatsApp Pay service. Since it started in 2009, WhatsApp has become the most popular way for people worldwide to talk to each other. More than 2 billion people in more than 180 different countries use it. More than 100 billion messages are sent daily on its platform. Jan Koum was a director at Facebook Inc. and helped start WhatsApp. He said he was leaving Facebook in 2018. Media reports say that Koum left the company because he didn't like how the company used user data and how it wanted to put ads on WhatsApp. Let us see how WhatsApp makes money.
More than "One Dollar at a Time"
Before, $1 at a time was the short answer. It used to cost about $1 in some countries to download the app. In some, the first year is free, but after that, each year costs $1. In other words, there was a way to pay for WhatsApp. In a 10-Q filing from January 2016, Facebook said that since WhatsApp only made money in "minimal ways," it might not make enough money in the long run and that the strategy would change. Not long after that, WhatsApp announced in a blog post that subscriptions were no longer needed and that the messaging app would now be free to use.
Still, the app doesn't have any ads. At the time, the company said, "Starting this year, we will test tools that let you use WhatsApp to talk to businesses and organizations you want to hear from." The goal is for people to be able to talk directly to their banks, airlines, etc., through the app while the companies pay the bills that were previously paid through subscriptions.
Other Text Message Apps
Although sending a text message from a country outside of the United States is more costly, SMS applications continue to be popular and profitable. WeChat is famous software in China for exchanging text messages, and it also has online games and advertisements. Because of this, another firm, Tencent, the company that controls WeChat and had revenues of $86.5 billion in 2021, exists.
Concentrating on Development
The messaging service WhatsApp is popular in many countries. India, with 390 million users, is followed by Brazil, with 108 million, and the United States of America, with 75 million users, as the top three nations with the most users. The proliferation of SMS applications is growing at an exponential rate. When one member of a social group downloads and promotes an app, many of the group's other members follow suit to communicate with that person. After that, the new users recommend the app to members of their other social networks, encouraging them to download it.
Is Money The Only Thing That Matters, Though?
Insiders in the industry think that one reason Meta bought WhatsApp was to access users' personal information and data about how they use the app. Meta has access to much personal information about its users because they share their locations, send 100 billion messages a day, and let Meta see their entire contact lists. All this information is sent to its servers, where it is saved. Mark Zuckerberg has said in the past that this information won't be used to help Meta ads target users better, but it will be if the user doesn't change their settings to stop giving Meta information.
Discussion on End-to-End Encryption
When it was discovered that terrorists used apps to talk before and during attacks, governments worldwide got mad at WhatsApp and other messaging services, like Apple. Governments and groups that work to stop terrorism asked the companies that made these apps for the encryption key so they could read the messages sent and received by terrorists. The businesses, on the other hand, didn't agree. This is why WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption. This means that no one but the sender and receiver can see the information shared on the app, not even WhatsApp.
In Conclusion
Even though it is now one of the most widely used messaging systems in the world, WhatsApp has a lot of space to expand in the future. Regardless of whether you believe that Meta paid an excessive amount for WhatsApp or not, the reality remains that the program has a growing income stream as well as several different methods to earn money, both of which will help it to make more money as time goes on. The importance of the app rises as a direct result of the growing number of people who use it, which leads to an increase in the number of people who use it.
