Facebook’s WhatsApp purchase clearly hasn’t dampened folks’ enthusiasm for the service.
The massively popular mobile messaging platform handled 64 billion messages in a single day, the company announced late last night in a tweet.
new daily record: 20B messages sent (inbound) and 44B messages received (outbound) by our users = 64B messages handled in just 24 hours.
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) April 2, 2014
That number is a tad inflated, as it counts a group message sent to 10 people as 10 separate received message, but it’s still a mind-boggling figure — one that helps put the staggering $19 billion sum Facebook plunked down on WhatsApp into context.
Still, Facebook faces an uphill battle when it comes to squeezing value out of the messaging platform’s 465 million users. WhatsApp, which has pledged not to sell ads, charges people $1 a year to use the service, but Facebook effectively paid $42 per user. Of course, Facebook could change WhatsApp’s ad policy, but a big chunk of its userbase are teens, whose loyalty has proven fickle when encountering unpleasant user experiences.
But we’re not trying to pour (too much) cold water on WhatsApp’s milestone, which topped the 54 million messages the platform processed on New Year’s Eve. Congrats, WhatsApp team. Now get back to courting Facebook’s next billion users.
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