WhatsApp has revealed that during the 24 hours leading up to midnight on New Year’s Eve, a record-breaking 100 billion private messages were sent via the Facebook-owned platform globally. It confirmed that this was more than the number on any previous day in the app’s 10-year history. What’s interesting is that out of the 100 billion, Indians sent over 20 billion messages on December 31.
According to WhatsApp stats, of the 100 billion messages sent, more than 12 billion were picture messages sent around the world on New Year’s Eve. ‘WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption ensures that only you and the person you're communicating with can read what's sent, and nobody else - not even WhatsApp. However it seems fair to assume that a very large number of messages sent on December 31 were wishing someone a ‘Happy New Year’,’ the platform said.
WhatsApp also revealed the top 5 most popular features worldwide over the course of the year. These are (in that order):
Meanwhile, a report said that WhatsApp Vice President Chris Daniels has confirmed that the the app will start to put advertisements in its ‘Status’ feature soon. The first look for the ads in the ‘Status’ was shown in the FMS19 conference in Berlin. Facebook estimates that around 2.2 billion people use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger every day on average, and around 2.8 billion people use at least one of our Family of services each month. WhatsApp has more than 1.5 billion active monthly users, Messenger has over 1.3 billion, and Instagram has over 1 billion active monthly users.
