Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg just shared a staggering statistic on his company’s Q2 earnings call, saying its messaging platform WhatsApp now has a whopping 250 million daily active users for its “Status” feature.
Status is WhatsApp’s version of Instagram Stories — which is coincidentally a copy of Snapchat’s Stories feature — allowing users to post pictures and video for their contacts to see. Zuckerberg reiterated the dominance of Instagram Stories as well, with the popular photo sharing app also boasting more than 250 million daily Stories users.
The two Facebook-owned apps are now lapping their chief competitor — Snapchat — which “only” has 166 daily active users.
WhatsApp has seen a rapid increase in Status users, with Facebook disclosing 175 million DAUs during its Q1 call back in May. Its increasing adoption underlines the popularity of being able to share content to a digital bulletin-board. Soon enough, the memes will be right: You’ll have a “Stories” feature on your calculator, microwave, and every other device.
And the scary part is considering how much room WhatsApp has to grow. It now has 1 billion DAUs and 1.3 monthly active users for its core messaging app.
Facebook’s Q2 earnings came in only a hair above analyst expectations, but still highlighted the social network’s overall mastery. It hauled in $9.3 billion in revenue (analysts projected $9.2 billion), spurred on by a its continued strength in mobile ads. 87 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue now comes from mobile devices.
Perhaps most daunting to its rivals is the pile of money Zuckerberg falls asleep on every night: Facebook has $35.45 billion in cash, more than Twitter and Snap’s combined market cap. Good luck to those plucky startups in their quest to keep up with Facebook on Stories — and everything else.
