How WhatsApp makes money | The US Sun

WHATSAPP is the world’s most popular instant messaging service, allowing users to send texts, photos, videos and voice messages for free.

Here’s everything you need to know about how the app makes money.

How does WhatsApp make money?

Start with Whatsapp made money by asking some users to pay the equivalent of $1 to download, with each year costing the same to renew.

But the company soon changed its business model and stayed away from in-app advertising.

Instead, they make money through premium services like WhatsApp for Business and WhatsApp Pay.

As of June 2024, the service has more than 2.78 billion users.

Who owns WhatsApp?

WhatsApp was created in 2009 by computer programmers Brian Acton and Jan Koum – former employees of Yahoo! Koum created the name WhatsApp because it sounded like “what’s up”.

After a series of adjustments, the application was launched with a messaging component in June 2009, with 250 thousand active users.

It was originally free, but switched to a paid service to avoid growing too quickly.

Eventually, social media giant Facebook purchased WhatsApp Inc in February 2014 and still owns the service today.

However, both Acton and Koum left the company.

How much did Facebook buy WhatsApp for?

On February 9, 2014, Mark Zuckerberg invited owners Acton and Koum to dinner at their home and made an official offer for him to join the Facebook forums.

It was announced 10 days later that Facebook was acquiring WhatsApp for $19 billion.

Later that year, Koum donated $555 million of his Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. However, things turned sour when WhatsApp started changing in ways that the co-founders didn’t like.

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In 2018, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton tweeted: “The time has come. #deletefacebook.”

An employee who helped jumpstart the deal later said he regretted his involvement.

Neeraj Arora, former chief business officer of WhatsApp, described Facebook as a “Frankenstein monster”, saying that promises were not kept and negatively impacted users.

When WhatsApp began considering a Zuckerberg acquisition in 2014, they said there should be no ads, games or gimmicks in the app.

But Ajora claimed that didn’t happen and said it was “a shadow of the product we put our hearts into and wanted to build for the world.”