Jan Koum: WhatsApp handles over 50 billion messages every day; will focus on “messaging” only

Submitted by Neelesh Raghuwanshi on Tue, 01/21/2014 - 12:00 

Jan Koum: WhatsApp handles over 50 billion messages every day; will focus on “messaging” only

According to a noteworthy revelation made by WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum at the DLD conference in Germany, the popular instant messaging app now handles more than 50 billion messages every day.
The disclosure is highly notable, especially in the wake of the fact that WhatsApp has a total staff of only around 50 employees; and the total number of monthly active users of the instant messaging service is approximately 430 million.
Moreover, the latest figure revealed by WhatsApp - about the messages it traffics every day - marks a substantial two-fold increase over the June 2013 numbers.  It was reported in June that an estimated number of 27 million messages were being sent and received through the WhatsApp service on a daily basis.
With the WhatsApp instant messaging service being currently free to download and use for one year, and, thereafter, costing just $0.99 per year, Koum said at the conference that the service is profitable.  However, he also added that monetization was not the key objective of WhatsApp as yet.
About the future of the WhatsApp service, Koum said that there will be "no ads, no games, no gimmicks"; and added: "We just want to focus on messaging.  If people want to play games there are plenty of other sites and also a lot of great companies building services around advertising."