Been using Whatsapp for a long time and so do loads of my friends in Europe. It is has solid market and it is growing according to some data I read reading Techcrunch. A no-nonsense chat tool that gets the job done. A like it and have not been tempted by other options like Viber or Line even though the latter is really popular here in Thailand

I don’t even remember paying for it, but it should now cost 0.99 a year per user. And there are 450 million users at the moment.

It will take Facebook a while to play even. Nineteen billion USD is a lot of cash and even if they double the user base it will still take a lot of time to make money out subscriptions.

They do say it about the user data and the fact that FB messenger is not gaining enough momentum to compete. The latter I believe. Like Business Insider said

For years, Facebook has tried to do what WhatsApp already does: It launched Messenger, a standalone messaging app that has had great reviews and maybe 350 million users … but that didn’t slow the growth of WhatsApp.

Well, we’ll see Zuckerberg.