Facebook-owned WhatsApp continues to grow its user base at a breakneck pace.
The messaging app has hit the 500 million global monthly active user (MAU) milestone, according to data shared by the company. That's up from about 430 million MAUs reported in January.
- WhatsApp has more than doubled users in the past year, growing 150%. 300 million MAUs, or roughly 60% of their current active audience, were added over the last year.
- Nearly 20% of its users are in India and Brazil. CEO Jan Koum revealed to Re/code that the countries have 48 million and 45 million MAUs, respectively. Koum also cites Russia and Mexico as regions driving a good deal of user growth for the company.
- But WhatsApp is still having trouble overthrowing its competitors in the Asia-Pacific region. WeChat is king in China, KakaoTalk in Korea, and LINE is bigger than WhatsApp in Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan, according to Re/code.
Regional performance aside, WhatsApp is on pace to eclipse 1 billion global MAUs faster than any of its competitors.
So, when will that happen?
In February 2014, around the time of its acquisition by Facebook, the company claimed it was adding roughly 1 million users per day. If the company had kept that pace, they would be on track to hit 1 billion MAUs by August 2015.
But, the 70 million users added in the last 100 days yields an average of about 700,000 new users per day. So there has been a bit of a deceleration in user growth since it was acquired by Facebook.
If WhatsApp keeps pace with the 700,000 per day user average, we estimate it will hit the 1 billion MAU milestone in early April 2016.
That means WhatsApp will hit that mark after seven years in existence. It took Facebook eight years to reach the same milestone.
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