WhatsApp: a guide to the future of messaging apps

WhatsApp: a guide to the future of messaging apps

Facebook’s $19bn acquisition of WhatsApp this week does much more than measure the breadth of Mark Zuckerberg’s spending power and his company’s ambition. It should highlight how important one of the most basic forms of digital communication – messaging – is to the internet’s future.
Here’s the first thing about all of this you should know: while US companies obviously have significant purchasing power, American startups are in some ways behind the global curve; much of the innovation is happening thousands of miles away from Menlo Park. And here’s the second thing: WhatsApp’s competitors make its current revenue model look really, really sluggish.
Messaging is enticing for a few reasons. For one, it’s a medium used by people all over the world. For another, it’s quieter; messages deliver a stream of photos, video or simple text direct from loved ones, without the added noise of everyone else on the internet. Messages provide for the fastest way for people to connect or find each other in a crowd. And messages allow people to buy stuff – lots and lots of stuff – in an almost criminally seamless manner.
Consider the following a 101 guide to some of the messaging apps you may not have heard about, including a brief refresher on WhatsApp. These apps provide services that WhatsApp/Facebook may hope to emulate in the race to make money and literally monopolize the world’s attention. (And if that sounds creepy, that’s because it sort of is.

App: WhatsApp

Short attention span version: Born and bred in Silicon Valley by two ex-Yahoo employees, this app registers one million new users per day, and 450m users per month use the service to send text, photo and video. And now it’s worth a lot of money.

 

Where it’s popular: Europe – up to 80% market penetration in countries including Brazil, Germany, Portugal and Spain – and Latin America, India
Numbers: $19bm is the only number anyone’s paying attention to at the moment
Why it’s worth watching: See above. Also, WhatsApp’s revenue strategy ($1 after a year of free use) looks especially sluggish compared to other apps offering similar services.
More reading: Dominic Rushe’s breaking story on the acquisition also has great background on founders’ visions for the tool – and more numbers, if you need them.