How WhatsApp ate the world

While Meta’s paid messaging tools brought in about $1 billion last year — peanuts compared to the whopping $132 billion the company earned from ads — paid messaging revenue is growing far faster than ad revenue and has more than doubled since early 2023.

WhatsApp initially achieved that global dominance in large part by doing just one thing very well: enabling cheap, private, and reliable messaging on almost any phone, almost anywhere in the world. But in the decade since Meta acquired WhatsApp for an eye-watering $22 billion in 2014, the app has been transformed from a narrowly focused utilitarian... See more