Popular messaging app WhatsApp on Monday January 18,2016 said it will
stop charging $1 per year subscription fee to go completely free for its
users across the world.
The service, which claims to
have over a billion users globally, also said it will not introduce any
third-party ads for monetisation.
“Nearly a billion
people around the world today rely on WhatsApp to stay in touch with
their friends and family...WhatsApp will no longer charge subscription
fees,” WhatsApp said on its official blog.
It further
said that while it has asked some of its users to pay a fee for using
WhatsApp after their first year, but “as we’ve grown, we’ve found that
this approach hasn’t worked well”.
Interestingly,
WhatsApp did not charge users for using the service in India, which is
one of the biggest markets for the service.
The
company, which was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, said it
was going to experiment with new models to stay ad-free.
“...over the next several weeks, we’ll remove fees from the different
versions of our app and WhatsApp will no longer charge you for our
service,” it said.
The company said starting this
year it will test tools which will allow its users to communicate with
businesses and organisations through its platform.
“That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent
transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight.
“We all get these messages elsewhere today - through text messages and
phone calls - so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on
WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads
and spam,” it added
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