WhatsApp now has 900 million monthly users

Despite a large number of people using WhatsApp, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg is not yet earning any revenues from it

WhatsApp, the messaging app that Facebook acquired for about $19 billion in 2014, has 900 million monthly active users (MAU), according to a Facebook post by Jan Koum, the co-founder of the app.

The number of users has increased from 800 million users in April. At the start of the year, there were 700 million people using WhatsApp and it is expected that the messaging app may have 1 billion users before the year ends.



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However, despite the large number of people using WhatsApp, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is not yet earning any revenues from it. Instead, he has been focusing on making it a natural place for people to communicate with businesses. Once that happens, he will devise ways to monetise from it but till then, he has asked investors to be patient.

"The long-term bet is that by enabling people to have good organic interactions with businesses, that will end up being a massive multiplier on the value of the monetisation down the road, when we really work on that, and really focus on that in a bigger way. So we ask for some patience on this to do this correctly," Zuckerberg said.

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Facebook also owns the second biggest messaging app in the world, Messenger, which had 700 million MAUs in June. WeChat, owned by Chinese company, Tencent, earns third place at 600 million MAUs. After that, there's a significant gap in size with Viber, acquired by Japanese company Rakuten in 2014, having 236 million monthly active users, and Line, another Japanese app, having 205 million.

This article originally appeared on Business Insider