2.2 billion is the number of WhatsApp users.
100 blllion messages are sent daily.
100 million use WhatApp payments also.
Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014 for 19 billion dollars, when the app had 450 million users and 55 employees.
Today, the app has over 4x the users, but did Facebook actually get a good deal?
A comparison, Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for 1 billion dollars, when they had 30 million users and zero revenue.
Today, Instagram has 1.4 billion users and ad revenue is going to be 33.2 billion dollars in 2022, with a projection of 39-40 billion dollars in 2023.
Facebook/Meta as a whole made 117 billion dollars in 2021, meaning Instagram this year will about 24-28% of revenue.
Instagram has made a clear profit on what was paid for it, possibly being the best corporate purchase of the last 20 years, the only exception being Apple buying PA Semi, for the chips to make the iPhone.
WhatsApp though, revenue is more vague and the way they do it makes not a ton of sense.
WhatsApp is entirely encrypted, meaning there’s little to no data to extract for advertising.
WhatsApp has a pretty single use purpose with messaging.
WhatsApp has payments, which have mainly only catered to less economically rich areas that PayPal are ignoring.
Finding out how much money WhatsApp makes, I could only find one report from BusinessofApps, which isn’t the best source and claimed revenue is 8.7 billion dollars.
The original idea was a $1 a year fee, but Mark Zuckerberg eliminated that holding to Facebook’s slogan “Free and always will be”.
They replaced it with a mix of transaction fees, a business API that lets businesses handle customer support issues via whatsapp and some advertising, largely linked with Facebook/Instagram, that’d probably be able to work with messenger pretty easily.
WhatsApp is clearly making money and very likely has produced a profit on the 19 billion invested, but why is it not making money comparable with Facebook or Instagram?
Simple reason, the United States.
12% of US mobile users in October of 2021 used WhatsApp.
56.8% used Messenger.
WhatsApp doesn’t have a huge base in the US, outside of people messaging family/friends internationally or people messaging their coke guy.
Text messages are cheaper in the US over most of the world, also American’s are 45% iPhone users, versus only 33% of global smart phone users using iphones.
This makes WhatsApp a harder product for Facebook to monetize being a US company, with a mainly international product that also has a different revenue model over the other core products.
Plus, messaging is just a low revenue business, where Discord, Telegram and other products have struggled to find an actual business model.
WhatsApp was worth the purchase, but they’ll have to make changes if they want it to make comparable money to Facebook or Instagram.