Meta’s WhatsApp is chasing big businesses in effort to finally capitalize on app’s popularity
It’s been almost a decade since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shocked the tech world, announcing his company’s agreement to spend $19 billion on WhatsApp, a popular messaging app with a tiny business.
Since then, WhatsApp has remained somewhat of an anachronism. Usage has continued to grow, with more than 2 billion people now counting on the app to chat with friends and family, up from 450 million at the time of the acquisition. But it’s still not much of a moneymaker.
Unlike Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012 for the much tidier sum of roughly $1 billion, WhatsApp doesn’t show ads, which is Zuckerberg’s core business. It’s also unrelated to his company’s hugely expensive pivot to the metaverse or its effort to catch up to TikTok with its short video product, Reels.
But the company now known as Meta has no intention of sidelining WhatsApp. Rather, Zuckerberg regularly touts the value of the asset and its potential to expand, boasting on Meta’s latest earnings call about the 200 million people who use the WhatsApp Business app, which helps companies communicate with clients. He told CNBC’s Jim Cramer in June 2022 that WhatsApp represents the “next chapter” for Meta.
To parlay its massive user base into a product that contributes in a big way to the bottom line, WhatsApp needs more large businesses across the globe to rely on the service as a main way to converse with customers. For each conversation, companies pay in the range of a half-cent to 15 cents, depending on the kind of chat and the country in which the exchange takes place.
“It’s been clear for many years that people are trying to connect with businesses on WhatsApp,” said Alice Newton-Rex, the unit’s product director, in an interview with CNBC. “If you go to India or Brazil and you look around, you’ll see WhatsApp numbers posted up in shop windows everywhere. This is how businesses want to engage with their customers.”
Consumers in India, for example, use WhatsApp to book Uber rides and get movie recommendations on their Netflix accounts.
Newton-Rex joined WhatsApp four years ago, leaving her high-level position at London-based financial firm WorldRemit for the new gig. At the time, WhatsApp only had 15 product managers, a number that’s since ballooned to 90.
The product group is now tasked with building features that can unlock WhatsApp’s business in a substantial way and in helping WhatsApp fulfill the potential that Zuckerberg has long seen in the app.
Newton-Rex said Zuckerberg has been “a big part of the team,” adding that he regularly speaks with Will Cathcart, the current head of WhatsApp.
“He’s a big part of our strategy,” she said about Zuckerberg’s support of WhatsApp and its road map.
WhatsApp’s popularity around the world is undeniable. In countries like Brazil, India and Indonesia, people use it to chat with family and friends and stay updated on current affairs. There’s particular appeal in countries that historically lacked robust telecommunications infrastructure, as WhatsApp has made it feasible for people in those regions to affordably communicate via smartphone.
“Back in 2009, it was extremely expensive to send a text message, and if you wanted to make a call or particularly an international call, that might set you back hundreds of dollars,” Newton-Rex said. “WhatsApp changed all that.”
Newton-Rex recalled the time a member of the app’s research group compared WhatsApp to oxygen.
“I think the idea that it’s sort of everywhere and it’s effortless to use, you maybe don’t think too deeply about using it, but you would be in real trouble if someone took it away,” she said.
What’s up with WhatsApp’s business?
But for analysts and investors, WhatsApp’s true value to Meta has long been unclear. The company doesn’t reveal the size of the business. Nick Lane, founder of research firm Mobilesquared, estimates its revenue to be between about $500 million and $1 billion, equaling less than 1% of Meta’s total sales.
Instagram, by contrast, will bring in a projected $40 billion in revenue this year, according to Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at Insider Intelligence.
“Facebook bought WhatsApp nearly nine years ago — It’s a long time to have an app that has enormous usage, but where’s the revenue?” Williamson said with a chuckle. “We’ve kind of been watching it for years and years going, ‘OK, guys.'”
The business challenge for WhatsApp dates back to its origins. Co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton publicly lambasted the advertising industry in a 2012 blog post, writing that “no one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.”
Former WhatsApp CEO and co-founder Jan Koum
David Ramos | Getty Images
In the years after the Facebook deal, Koum and Acton reportedly clashed with executives over issues related to data privacy and monetizing WhatsApp. Acton left in 2017, and Koum followed him out the door a year later.
It’s not just an issue of privacy and morals. As Williamson noted, WhatsApp’s core function as an encrypted platform for people to send each other private messages isn’t particularly “conducive to advertising.” Does a user really want a McDonald’s promotion to pop up alongside private messages with family members?
Yet throughout its almost two decades, Facebook has never had much of a business outside of ads, even as it’s expanded into consumer gadgets and the metaverse and, in the case of WhatsApp, getting companies to pay for messaging.
The plan is five years in the making. Meta kick-started its WhatsApp Business app in 2018, pitching it as a way for companies to more easily communicate with users through verified commercial accounts and a suite of in-app tools. In June, Meta said the WhatsApp Business app had quadrupled in the past three years to 200 million monthly active users.
Small companies can use the app for free or, depending on the country, pay a monthly subscription for added features like the ability to build a WhatsApp website, and to access a corporate account on up to 10 devices. Larger companies can pay for more expansive messaging campaigns and features to help them provide more customer service and support to big audiences via the WhatsApp Business platform.
With the upper-tier service, Meta charges per conversation, and the fee varies. In Brazil, for instance, a brief authentication conversation in which users are prompted to enter one-time passcodes for verification could cost a company 3.15 cents, while more complicated and extended marketing conversations detailing new promotions or special deals may cost 6.25 cents.
Meta said in its most recent annual report that sales in the company’s “Family of Apps-other revenue” segment, which houses the WhatsApp Business platform and other revenue sources like the net fees Meta receives from developers using its payment infrastructure, grew 12% year over year to $808 million in 2022.
While companies can’t run online ads on WhatsApp, they can buy a special kind of ad that’s now core to WhatsApp’s business strategy called “click-to-message,” which essentially redirects Instagram and Facebook users to WhatsApp to initiate an immediate conversation, Newton-Rex said.
Mark Zuckerberg told the world in October 2021 that he was rebranding Facebook to Meta as the company pushes toward the metaverse.
Facebook | via Reuters
It’s a strategy Meta is deploying more broadly. Zuckerberg said last year that the company’s click-to-message ad products running across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram are generating about $9 billion in annualized revenue. Most of those sales stem from the company’s Messenger app, which was first to offer that type of ad, but Zuckerberg said that the WhatsApp-specific click-to-message ads “just passed a $1.5 billion run rate, growing more than 80% year over year.” Meta says that all rolls up to total ad revenue and is not housed within WhatsApp.
More recently, Zuckerberg said during Meta’s first-quarter 2023 earnings call that the company’s click-to-message ads reached $10 billion in annualized revenue and added that “paid messaging on WhatsApp — has grown by 40% quarter over quarter,” without giving a revenue figure.
In addition to the newer ad products, Newton-Rex also highlighted WhatsApp’s Channels feature, which Meta debuted in June. The new tool, which is akin to a similar feature available in the Telegram messaging app, is intended to function like a “private broadcast service,” separate from the core WhatsApp messaging that takes place between friends and family members. It lets organizations and power users create their own channels to send messages or post updates and polls to large groups of people.
Although Channels is currently only available in a few countries, including Colombia and Singapore, Newton-Rex said Meta has bigger plans in store for the product and is considering ways to make money from it.
“Maybe you’ll be able to subscribe to a channel and you’d pay a small fee to hear from a news outlet or some celebrity who you cared about,” Newton-Rex said. “That could include also allowing channel owners to promote their own channel in our directory.”
As a broadcast tool, Channels isn’t an encrypted service. In the future, WhatsApp may allow groups like nonprofits or health organizations to ensure communications are encrypted for user or patient protection, the company said.
In looking for other ways to make money from Channels, ads could be an option, as there’s now a way for companies to run promotions without forcing them into a stream of confidential messages.
“We’re looking at a whole range of different monetization opportunities,” Newton-Rex said. “We haven’t fixed on any one thing yet.”
Cracking the U.S.
For all of Meta’s focus on WhatsApp expansion, the U.S. remains an elusive market, even though it’s a huge part of the parent company’s business. In the latest quarter, the U.S. and Canada combined accounted for 45% of Meta’s revenue.
According to Insider Intelligence data released in May, WhatsApp user penetration around the world was the highest in Spain, Italy and Argentina. In each country, at least 80% of internet users accessed WhatsApp once a month or more. In the U.S., that number was just 21.8%.
Still, Newton-Rex called North America WhatsApp’s “fastest-growing region,” without elaborating.
Researchers have found that the people in the U.S. most likely to use WhatsApp come from immigrant communities with extended family in other countries. The Pew Research Center has previously detailed that WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app used by Hispanic Americans.
For “a lot of people around the world who don’t use so many different internet services, WhatsApp is their gateway into having interactions on the internet,” Newton-Rex said.
Because WhatsApp uses encryption technology, it’s also attractive for people in countries with more repressive government regimes, while consumers in the U.S. are generally comfortable using Apple’s iMessage as well as direct messages on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter.
Newton-Rex said part of WhatsApp’s marketing strategy in the U.S. focuses on the app’s encryption technology, because data privacy often “comes up as an absolute top concern” for users. Last year, the company debuted a major promotional campaign highlighting WhatsApp’s encryption features.
Meta has been hammered in recent years by a number of data privacy blunders, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, scarring the company’s reputation.
“People really do know how important end-to-end encryption is,” Newton-Rex said. “They know that they don’t want their messages to be vulnerable to hackers, criminals, oppressive governments or anyone else who’s trying to listen in.”
Meanwhile, as Meta and other tech giants pour billions of dollars into generative artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg recently said his company plans to include more advanced chatbots into WhatsApp and other messaging tools.
Newton-Rex said Meta’s push into generative AI could assist in the development of more kinds of “business applications.”
“I think that messaging is going to be the main way that people interact with generative AI in future,” she said. “Imagine being able to have a really easy, instant, real-time conversation whenever you wanted to get customer service or to buy something with a business who you wanted to transact with. But it’s not just business applications.”
The global business messaging space is currently worth about $32 billion and is dominated by SMS, or short message service, technology that’s used to send things like status updates on airplane flight changes, Mobilesquared’s Lane said.
Lane said WhatsApp has the opportunity to offer more compelling ways for businesses to communicate with customers beyond short, simple text messages.
“For example, if you’re a restaurant, you can put your whole menu, different pages of your menu on WhatsApp,” Lane said. “The experience that you can have on a website or on an app, you can now have that within the messaging experience.”
That looks like a far-off promise, at least in the North American market. Williamson from Insider Intelligence said she does “not see any leap in usage of WhatsApp in the U.S.” in the near future.
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A screen showing the price of various cryptocurrencies against the US dollar displayed at a Crypto Panda cryptocurrency store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025.
Lam Yik | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The crypto market slid Friday after President Donald Trump unveiled his modified “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries.
The price of bitcoin showed relative strength, hovering at the flat line while ether, XRP and Binance Coin fell 2% each. Overnight, bitcoin dropped to a low of $114,110.73.
The descent triggered a wave of long liquidations, which forces traders to sell their assets at market price to settle their debts, pushing prices lower. Bitcoin saw $172 million in liquidations across centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, and ether saw $210 million.
Crypto-linked stocks suffered deeper losses. Coinbase led the way, down 15% following its disappointing second-quarter earnings report. Circle fell 4%, Galaxy Digital lost 2%, and ether treasury company Bitmine Immersion was down 8%. Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy was down by 5%.
Bitcoin falls below $115,000
The stock moves came amid a new wave of risk off sentiment after President Trump issued new tariffs ranging between 10% and 41%, triggering worries about increasing inflation and the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates. In periods of broad based derisking, crypto tends to get hit as investors pull out of the most speculative and volatile assets. Technical resilience and institutional demand for bitcoin and ether are helping support their prices.
“After running red hot in July, this is a healthy strategic cooldown. Markets aren’t reacting to a crisis, they’re responding to the lack of one,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “With no new macro catalyst on the horizon, capital is rotating out of speculative assets and into safer ground … it’s a calculated pause.”
Crypto is coming off a winning month but could soon hit the brakes amid the new macro uncertainty, and in a month usually characterized by lower trading volumes and increased volatility. Bitcoin gained 8% in July, according to Coin Metrics, while ether surged more than 49%.
Ether ETFs saw more than $5 billion in inflows in July alone (with just a single day of outflows of $1.8 million on July 2), bringing it’s total cumulative inflows to $9.64 to date. Bitcoin ETFs saw $114 million in outflows in the final trading session of July, bringing its monthly inflows to about $6 billion out of a cumulative $55 billion.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 20, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google has purged more than 50 organizations related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, from a list of organizations that the tech company provides funding to, according to a new report.
The company has removed a total of 214 groups from its funding list while adding 101, according to a new report from tech watchdog organization The Tech Transparency Project. The watchdog group cites the most recent public list of organizations that receive the most substantial contributions from Google’s U.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team.
The largest category of purged groups were DEI-related, with a total of 58 groups removed from Google’s funding list, TTP found. The dropped groups had mission statements that included the words “diversity, “equity,” “inclusion,” or “race,” “activism,” and “women.” Those are also terms the Trump administration officials have reportedly told federal agencies to limit or avoid.
In response to the report, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told CNBC that the list reflects contributions made in 2024 and that it does not reflect all contributions made by other teams within the company.
“We contribute to hundreds of groups from across the political spectrum that advocate for pro-innovation policies, and those groups change from year to year based on where our contributions will have the most impact,” Castañeda said in an email.
Organizations that were removed from Google’s list include the African American Community Service Agency, which seeks to “empower all Black and historically excluded communities”; the Latino Leadership Alliance, which is dedicated to “race equity affecting the Latino community”; and Enroot, which creates out-of-school experiences for immigrant kids.
The organization funding purge is the latest to come as Google began backtracking some of its commitments to DEI over the last couple of years. That pull back came due to cost cutting to prioritize investments into artificial intelligence technology as well as the changing political and legal landscape amid increasing national anti-DEI policies.
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley and other industries used DEI programs to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and advance the careers of women and people of color — demographics that have historically been overlooked in the workplace.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end affirmative action at colleges led to additional backlash against DEI programs in conservative circles.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order upon taking office in January to end the government’s DEI programs and directed federal agencies to combat what the administration considers “illegal” private-sector DEI mandates, policies and programs. Shortly after, Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.
Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term, many companies are continuing the work but using different language or rolling the efforts under less-charged terminology, like “learning” or “hiring.”
Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai maintained the importance diversity plays in its workforce at an all-hands meeting in March.
“We’re a global company, we have users around the world, and we think the best way to serve them well is by having a workforce that represents that diversity,” Pichai said at the time.
One of the groups dropped from Google’s contributions list is the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which provides training, assistance, and public awareness campaigns on the issue of violence against women, the TTP report found. The group had been on Google’s list of funded organizations for at least nine years and continues to name the company as one of its corporate partners.
Google said it still gave $75,000 to the National Network to End Domestic Violence in 2024 but did not say why the group was removed from the public contributions list.
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