Three months after being acquired by facebook, WhatsApp have announced that they now have 700 million monthly active users, with users sending over 30 billion messages a day.
Most messaging platforms are now counting “active” users, opposed to subscribed users, as active users is a more meaningful figure.
WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum wrote in a Facebook post.
I hope you all had a happy and peaceful holiday season. Today, we’re thrilled to share that WhatsApp has more than 700 million monthly active users. Additionally, every day our users now send over 30 billion messages. As humbled and excited as we are by these numbers and our continued growth, we’re even more excited to keep building a great product in 2015. Most of all, we’re grateful that so many of you are using WhatsApp to stay in touch with your friends and family, business colleagues and classmates. We promise to continue working hard to make WhatsApp even better.
Despite the massive user base, WhatsApp still doesn’t have any public plans to monetize the app. In October, Koum said that Facebook wasn’t looking to monetize WhatsApp, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said in the past that he doesn’t want to try to make money from WhatsApp until the service reaches a billion users.
700 million makes WhatsApp the world’s most popular messaging application, compared to the most recent figures  WeChat’s 438 million and Facebook Messenger’s 500 million. It also is well ahead of most social applications, given the fact that Instagram just hit 300 million, Twitter is currently at 284 million and Snapchat was reportedly at 100 million in August.
