Love Digital: Apps are dead, long live Whatsapp
By Teamspirit on Wednesday, 27 January 2016
What makes us love digital so much this week?
We love the new direction messaging apps are taking.
Apps are dead, long live Whatsapp
Whatsapp, the Facebook owned messaging app, is scrapping the 99-Cent subscription fee (charged after a year of usage) and shaking up its business model. On their blog post published on Monday, they stayed committed to not introducing third party advertising and spam. Instead, they are testing tools that allows users to ‘WhatsApp’ with businesses and organisations that they’d want to hear from.They are not the first messaging company to move in this direction. Wechat, which operates mostly in the Chinese market, already allows users to interact with businesses within the app. WeChatters can order a taxi and pay for goods within the platform.
This move comes as part of a shift from messaging apps acting merely as a social messaging system to a personalised platform that can support a user in every part of their daily life, from interacting with the bank to ordering food. Ultimately, in the long term one app will act as a go-to for all a user’s needs.
It’s thought that advertisers will be keen to jump on the opportunity to speak directly to their customers. In the UK, Whatsapp already accounts for 9% of the total time that people spend in mobile apps and they have a global Monthly Active user base of 900,000 users sending a total of 64 billion messages a day*. With such impressive figures we recommend that you Whatsapp this space...
*According to Forrester Research **Source Statistica 2016
