Apart from the 600 million active users that Whatsapp has, Facebook has recently announced that about 500 million users are currently using Messenger, making it a billion active users in all.
In speaking of its functionality given this milestone, the company, in a blog post, wrote, “Messenger was the first of our standalone apps, and unlike our core Facebook apps, it focused on one use case – messaging. With Messenger, you can reach people instantly. It is just as fast as SMS but gives you the ability to express yourself in ways that SMS can’t. You can send stickers or videos, take selfies, chat with groups and make free calls. We’ve also continued to improve speed and reliability. Updates to Messenger ship every two weeks so it continues to evolve and improve.”
While these two services remain independent, it’s clear that across both these services, Facebook now has 1 billion users in all even if the overlap between the two has not been determined yet.
What is for sure is that this is big news for Messenger since it only had about 200 million users in April 2014 then even if it pointed out that it had passed the 1 billion mobile users mark.
Although, we won’t see ads or monetization of this app, more than half the ad revenues generated are because of ads being displayed on its main app.
Finally, the company will continue to post updates every two weeks and this will not slow down in the near future, with innovation and improvements being the focus of its team.