How WhatsApp evolved from a messaging app into a business messaging growth platform, aggressively luring big businesses to its suite of paid messaging products
Just a point for this article. India's installed base is given at 400 million. Last i saw it had crossed 600 and growing rapldly. It's the social glue here like iMessage in the us or line in Korea Siddhartha Golu / @siddharthagolu.com : Beginning of the end of “private” WhatsApp [image] Paul Armstrong / @paularmstrongtbd : Great read here. Love @restofworld.org - follow if you aren't! [embedded post] Aaron Alberico / @alberico : Long gone are the days of companies like Meta pretending to care about privacy. — Great piece, @issielapowsky.bsky.social! @issielapowsky : One interesting nugget from this: how Meta AI, which is now baked into WhatsApp's search bar, is complicating WhatsApp's encryption promises. — restofworld.org/2024/how-wha... [image] @issielapowsky : For @restofworld.org, I wrote about Meta's delicate balancing act in trying to transform WhatsApp from a utilitarian messaging tool to a kind of everything app for businesses. restofworld.org/2024/how-wha... David Craig / @producing2power : A fascinating article about the global success of WhatsApp (except in China and the U.S.) only neither WeChat nor TikTok (and their new messenger service are mentioned. That's because India banned 500 Chinese apps for the past 5 years. — #PlatformNationalism — restofworld.org/2024/how-wha... Mastodon: Nithin Coca / @ncoca@social.coop : Lots of interesting details in this @restofworld piece on #whatsapp — #India, #Brazil, #Mexico and #Indonesia the largest markets. — 400 million daily users in India (means 800 million non-users?). 90% of Brazilians use it 🤯 — Increasingly becoming an ad revenue machine for #Meta #Facebook … X: @rinachandran : WhatsApp is the most widely used messaging app, with 2 bln daily users who send 100 bln messages every day in 60 languages across 180 countries. A look at how it grew so big and what comes next reports @issielapowsky for @restofworld https://restofworld.org/... @asinvideogames : That said, despite our success, it is still really early, and our clients have a long list of suggestions, as L'Oreal states: “I'm not fully happy...it can get way bigger.” Check out this great overview of the WhatsApp Business: https://restofworld.org/... @asinvideogames : Because the US is not a messaging-first country, I get a lot of questions from companies here about the business we are building on WhatsApp, how we monetize, how brands/consumers are using it. @restofworld wrote a great article with some quotes from one of my clients, L'Oreal: @asinvideogames : This is an API-based, consumption business model, no ads, which means everything we do has to drive business value and be additive to the consumer: @asinvideogames : “The company soon found that open rates for messages on WhatsApp could be six times higher than on email. Customers also spent more and made more frequent purchases when they shopped via WhatsApp...We didn't choose WhatsApp. The Latin American population chose WhatsApp. We chose @asinvideogames : Messaging apps are also a effective surface for customer-facing conversational AI. Small businesses can just turn on agents today that help them respond to their customers, so they can focus on the parts of the business they love. Enterprises can integrate their AI experiences LinkedIn: Itika Sharma Punit : Excited to share the first dispatch of Rest of World's three-story deep-dive into one of the world's most popular apps: #WhatsApp. …