New York, USA.
The WhatsApp chat platform turns 15 this Saturday, solidified as the most popular communication tool in the world, with even more 2 billion users Who take advantage of its free and encrypted service, something that complicates its profitability.
The instant messaging application was created on February 24, 2009 by two former employees Yahoo, Jan Koum and Brian ActonAnd in 2014 it became part of what is now Meta, when its founder, Mark ZuckerbergFor approximately $19,000 million.
According to the latest study of Social Networks Of IAB Spain (2023), WhatsApp It remains the most valuable application of its kind, the one used most often – several times a day – and with greater intensity, and the most transversal, as it is the favorite of the Millennial, Zeta and Alpha generations.
According to the Statista website, 2,000 million WhatsApp users worldwide make messaging rivals like Chinese WeChat (1,336 million), Facebook Messenger (979 million) and Telegram (800 million) pale.
The ‘App’ is incorporating increasingly complex innovations: from video calls or voice notes, now basic, to the possibility of creating groups and now even leaving them without all the members knowing. Its most recent innovation is to allow you to edit messages already sent.
As expected, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already made its way into the news, although due to their private nature they are real: users to generate emoticons, images and chat with an assistant within “range”. Can use technology.
“AI can read what’s sent to them, but your personal messages are still encrypted from end to end, so no one, including Meta, can see them,” the company says on its website. Will provide technology. Of developers and companies, one of its veins.
And since 2018, the ‘app’ has offered the WhatsApp Business platform for corporate communications, which has about 200 million users willing to pay cents for each interaction with its customers and which seems to be the solution to the problem of profitability. It happens.
Minority income within the ‘target family’
Meta does not discount the volume of WhatsApp’s business, which some analysts estimate at about 1% of the total, and prefers to refer to its “family of apps”, which includes Instagram and Facebook with a large advertising business. , and their combined turnover in 2023 was worth ₹133,000 million.
According to specialized media, the potential monetization of the application was one of the reasons why its founders left Meta a few years after Zuckerberg’s purchase, as they criticized that people did not want to see ads when talking to their friends and family.
According to Insider Intelligence data collected by CNBC, WhatsApp has the largest reach in Spain, Italy and Argentina, although other pages point to countries like Brazil and India. While it is not very popular in the United States, classic telephone text messaging (SMS) remains prevalent.
(tagstotranslate)United States of America