Ever since he bought WhatsApp, Zuck said that the service would reach the big milestone

Aug 25, 2014 12:23 GMT  ·  By

Back in February, WhatsApp was already a well-known name among those who like to text their friends without actually having to pay the SMS fees required by each telco. When Facebook bought the mobile app maker, however, the name was on everyone’s lips.

There are a few reasons for this, one of which is the fact that Facebook doesn’t really make many purchases. The second, and most important, is the fact that the world’s largest social network dug deep in its pockets to find a staggering $19 billion (14.4 billion) for the acquisition. With this kind of price tag, it was impossible for Whatsapp to remain a “secret.”

The expensive purchase made a lot of people wonder how exactly Facebook intends to make money out of this. WhatsApp’s subscription plans are extremely cheap and chances are pretty high that they’re not going to shoot up any time soon.

Back in February, WhatsApp had about 450 million active users every month, an impressive feat by any standards. The fact that its userbase had skyrocketed in just a few short years should also be noted.

That’s because Mark Zuckerberg hopes to achieve the 1 billion users milestone with WhatsApp too, not just Facebook. “More than 1 million people sign up for WhatsApp every day and it is on its way to connecting one billion people. More and more people rely on WhatsApp to communicate with all of their contacts every day,” Zuck wrote in his post at the time.

Six months later, WhatsApp now has 600 million monthly active users. Jan Koum, one of the founders of the messaging app, posted about the new milestone on Twitter and mentioned that the numbers of active and registered users are completely different.

That’s over 150 million users in six months, big evidence of the growth power behind WhatsApp.

Certainly, Zuckerberg doesn’t expect its $19 billion investment to reach the desired numbers in a really short time since he already has the background of building Facebook from scratch. Even so, WhatsApp is growing fast and it will probably reach the number of active users that Facebook’s exec envisions for it.

Hopefully, by then, they’d have figured out a way to turn WhatsApp into a profitable investment for Facebook. After all, $19 billion is a really big number.